Volume 20: Issue 1 (2024)
Biodiversity’s Conceptions and Values as Determining Factors in its International Protection
Lynda Hubert Ta
In the context of the ecological crisis and international efforts to remedy it, this article takes a look, from a historical perspective, at the evolution of the international protection of biodiversity. Its objective is to examine and understand, based on an essentially doctrinal analysis supplemented by an analysis of the most recent international texts, the various conceptions of biodiversity as well as the values that have been attributed to it, over the course of the global strategies deployed for its protection. The origin and evolution of these protection strategies and approaches have indeed been marked by different currents of thought based on certain values. These strategies and approaches are therefore not neutral. Thus, our review shows that the utilitarian approaches, based on the instrumental values of biodiversity, have historically been prioritized, particularly in the modern international framework of the protection of biodiversity. This favors a protection subordinated to the imperatives of growth, raising questions as to this framework’s adequacy in view of appropriately protecting biodiversity. The article dwells in a factual, historical and philosophical way on the long tradition of international biodiversity protection, in order to understand its foundations. How has this protection been historically captured, organized and implemented internationally and what are its effects on the current international protection framework?
Anna Chadwick, Emma Cardwell, Omar Felipe Giraldo, Kate Keller, Rosa López, Julia McClure, Peter Rosset & Alberto Vallejo Reyna
In this article, we critically examine Sembrando Vida—a Mexican social and economic development programme that pays individual farmers a subsidy to plant trees on their land—through the lens of a new instrument in the landscape of international human rights law (IHRL): the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). Sembrando Vida purports to simultaneously advance efforts to combat climate change and to enhance rural social development, and the programme leans heavily on its promise to learn from “Indigenous” and “peasant” lifestyles to enhance its legitimacy. We interviewed people impacted by the Sembrando Vida project. Here, we draw on the evidence we gathered to contest its presentation as a human rights-respecting development programme, and to demonstrate that the programme is undermining traditional agroecological practices that offer a more sustainable and equitable alternative to combatting climate change. By analysing Sembrando Vida through the lens of UNDROP, we demonstrate that a project that purports to learn from rural and peasant communities in their stewardship of nature is a form of mandate system that seeks to nurse rural communities, as opposed to fledgling nations, into a particular vision of economic health. Sembrando Vida is, predictably, remunerative for private investors and state actors trying to develop the poorer regions of Mexico through a number of disparate large-scale infrastructure projects that traverse constitutionally protected common lands.
COVID-19, the SDG Agenda, and Implementation Paralysis: Cash Transfer Programs to the Rescue?
Nandini Ramanujam, Nicholas Caivano, Alexander Agnello, & Kassandra Neranjan
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified global development needs and widened the funding gap for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDG Agenda, which represents the global commitment to achieving the SDGs, necessitates that implementation be cohesive and non-selective, ensuring that the goals are not treated as discrete entities but rather as interlinked objectives to be pursued simultaneously for the Agenda’s full realization. However, we argue that responding to specific pandemic-driven development deficits requires recognizing limits to SDG indivisibility. By analyzing the pandemic’s impact on food security (SDG 2) and primary and secondary education (SDG 4), we show how the widespread erosion of development progress on these goals threatens the Agenda as their attainment forms a foundation for durable progress on other SDGs. Cash transfer programs designed to address erosions of development progress could provide some direction in moving beyond the rigidity of non-selective realization and SDG implementation paralysis.