Human Rights in a Changing Environment - The Fusion Process of Human Rights and Environmental Protection into a Right to Environment

The triple environmental crisis is considered to be the central human rights challenge of the 21st century. Attempts to frame environmental protection as a human rights issue can be traced back to the 1960s but lost momentum in the 1990s. Only in the 2010s, rights-based approaches to environmental degradation regained increasing international attention. Against the reluctance of powerful actors, advocates of this linkage succeeded in merging claims for environmental protection with human rights, eventual leading to the recognition of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right at the United Nations. This emergence of a substantive human right to environment out of human rights and environmental protection norms constitutes a promising case for studying the conditions of successful (positive) norm linkage. The present paper comprehends ‘norms’ not as consistent, singular objects providing ends for action, but as complex normative configurations. Normative configurations are compositions of - partly inconsistent - practices that establish regulation, orientation and room for contestation and provide means and ends alike. By addressing the question, in how far advocacy networks have contributed to the fusion process of international human rights and environmental protection, this paper moves beyond the focus on individual normative configurations common in constructivism, and acknowledges the dynamics between them. The paper uses the three-stage analytical process of normative transformation proposed by Simon Pratt, which consists of de-reification, attributing agency and tracing transactions. To supplement the analysis, expert interviews were conducted. This process is used to analyze those normative transformations underlying the fusion process of formerly distinct normative configurations. Building on Fehl´s concept of hybridization, this paper understands normative fusion as discursive and institutional shifts merging separate normative configurations into one novel normative arrangement as a result of their contested relations. I argue that actors can activate such contestations regarding the relationship between normative configurations by linking them with each other. Based on insights into advocacy networks´ influence on the dynamics of individual normative configurations, this paper claims that the constellation of those networks and the level of alignment between such actors from the relevant regimes affects the dynamic and contested relations between normative configurations as well. A closer examination of the case suggests that actors linking the normative configurations of environmental protection and human rights in a positive way enabled contestation over their relationship. This forged actors to reach normative compromises that were observable first in the “greening of human rights” and ultimately in the constitution of a human right to environment. Preliminary results lead us to expect that the constellation of networks framing issues of environmental protection in a human rights-based manner did allow for various degrees of success in the merging of environmental human rights. In the 1990s, the constellation of the respective advocacy network was comprised mostly of environmental actors, while prominent human rights advocates, such as Amnesty International, did not align themselves with the claims. Their recent alignment and the synthesis of networks from both relevant regimes have enabled a more legitimate and coherent advocacy for normative fusion.