In a project focused on human rights, governance, and socio-ecological justice, what happened when the framework of rights fell away? Would the rights framing be recovered or even expanded? And how did this shape our understanding of governance?
These are questions that have arisen in Ecological Emergencies Experiments for Change, a project the authors undertook as part of the Future of Human Rights and Governance (FORGE) program. It was an experiment for change in governance and in how we connect to each other in a team with diverse perspectives and a shared commitment to learning from community-based wisdom.
Our team of six—also influenced by rich contributions from other participants on the FORGE journey—comprised a tapestry of Global North and South heritages, identities, and experiences; academic and grassroots community practices; and work, including public organizing, transnational feminism, human rights law, environmental law, drama and theatre studies, and decolonial perspectives.
The goal of the project was to engage in dialogues with people whose voices may be heard less often in the public discourse on rights and the ecological emergency, and across older and younger generations. We sought to ask how they understood care and how they practiced it to further the well-being of those within their communities, human and/or more-than-human. Dialogues were conducted on Long Island in the United States with members of a Latino community theater group and in Glasgow, Scotland, with a diverse group of university students and members of a working, creative community.
This experiment has explored our own as well as others’ practices and visions of just socio-ecological futures. We came together through FORGE and, for that reason alone, thought it fitting to place human rights at the center of this project. However, as a framework to draw together our collective perspectives emerged, an explicit human rights framing receded.
Knowledge and wisdom
In developing a framework for collaborative inquiry, we focused on the way that each of us talked about desirable socio-ecological futures and how to achieve them. In melding our different ways of knowing, we veered away from an explicit human rights framing. Instead, we prioritized shared learning about intergenerational care-centered sustainable praxis that centers humans and more-than-humans in communities whose wisdom often goes unrecognized in international environmental and human rights governance.
This shift also expanded our research approach beyond typical methods like interviews and focus groups. We were drawn towards dialogues, storytelling, and other creative practices as methods that could be more inclusive and less extractive.
In both framework and approach, we came to adapt our thinking. This required unlearning and receptiveness to diverse forms of knowledge and wisdom, within our team and in our community conversations.
A stitch in time
There were more or less pronounced, more or less surfaced, and more or less divergent perspectives on the time horizon(s) that motivated our individual thinking. These perspectives did not align with academic disciplines. For example, for one of us—a lawyer, a pragmatic here-and-now perspective emerged; yet for another—also a lawyer, more radical long-term thinking was prominent. These perspectives, across the whole team, aligned with our ways of understanding the time horizons of social change and our contributions to it. Thinking through what we each saw as the work of the present, of the near future, and of the far future helped bring to light what may become ingrained and implicit, in turn enabling more effective collaborative communication.
To stitch together different time orientations, we developed a “prefigurative” approach that focused on how we, and the communities from whom we sought to learn, live out—in the present—the more just futures we envision. This approach engages ways of being, talking, and acting in the present time horizon based on our projection of near- and far-future time horizons. It is well suited to the diverse time-priority perspectives in our project team and to the context of the ecological crisis that is felt by differently situated communities as nearer to, or further from, the present. Bringing time orientations to light also provided an anchor for our focus on intergenerational knowledge and cyclical time. We designed a way of gathering wisdom and learning from it across different generations, guided by an understanding of past, present, and future as co-existent rather than linear.
Lost, then found?
Instead of straining to maintain an explicit human rights framing at the heart of our experiment, we let it go and instead allowed ourselves to learn from each other and from lesser-heard wisdom and to lean into a perspective that anchored our inquiry in both the present and future. Our project became animated by a desire to understand the solidarity between human rights and care-centered praxis for people and the planet that could be generative for movement building and could deepen understandings of governance. We thereby moved from framing our questions using a human rights lens to asking whether we could learn something about rights for humans and more-than-humans as an outcome of the experiment.
What we did learn is that care-centered praxis resonated in the groups to whom we spoke. For some, there was a sense of surprise in being asked about practices of care within communities, which was a deeply ingrained “reflex,” as one person described it. In a follow-up conversation, people expressed hope and positivity, having surfaced their own wisdom, but also wariness of connecting care to formal governance, with the risk of it being “killed by bureaucracy.” Members of the theater group were moved to consider developing a play in response to our conversations about centering care.
Whether we will find a human rights framing again remains to be seen as we continue to reflect on community wisdom. Our approach has led us to think about why a human—or, indeed, more-than-human—rights framing is seen as valuable in the first place; it has cautioned us against oversimplifying as a way of avoiding tensions; and it has emphasized the need to amplify holistic forms of care that value human and more-than-human beings.
Cosmo-local governance
The project has encouraged us to rethink governance of rights beyond the nation-state and intergovernmental structures to a “cosmo-local” scale. Although the UN and intergovernmental bodies have been centering the sustainable development framework since the 1980s, escalating crises show the failure of this global governance structure. Annual interstate meetings generate commitments without accountability mechanisms. So, even as a global consensus emerges on the need to address various ecological and social crises, the current governance structures seem inadequate for such tasks.
In our discussions, colleagues raised the importance of trans-local spaces of governance, which empower citizens to demand accountability from their local officials. Seeing and amplifying governance at this scale means acknowledging the many ways of understanding the world that shape praxis at the local level. For example, as Cabrera Silva notes, Indigenous communities in Mexico have used a right to direct budgeting to facilitate self-governance, to both hold the state accountable and avoid dependence on external funders. Cosmo-local governance also means recognizing the movement and evolution of governance in multiple directions between local and networked trans-local communities.
Locating rights
Thinking about connections across governance scales, at the very least, requires an understanding of the human rights framework as a work in progress—perhaps, as Davis describes it, a transitional vocabulary, only 75 years young—that can be actively developed and inspired by local wisdom. One thing that the intergenerational dialogues taught us is that the language of care and the methodology of being in creative and reflective conversation enabled people to see their lived experiences as relevant to the co-creation of practices, knowledge, and hopefully policies that can contribute to addressing eco-social justice
In a message to the FORGE conference participants, the UN high commissioner for human rights argued for anchoring solutions to current crises, including the ecological crisis, in empathy and solidarity—what we might indeed describe as care. Put differently, at a minimum, we have learned that there is a case, in the present, for building and bridging practices of care—with its messy vulnerability, boundaries, labor, power dynamics, trust, pragmatism, and commitment—in a way that might renew visions of rights-respecting futures for all.