International human rights and climate change (policies): Challenging the concept of vulnerability

Abstract

For more than a decade, UN human rights institutions have increasingly highlighted the impact of climate change on the enjoyment of human rights and attempted to influence (inter)national policy-making, including policy-making on adaptation. Feminist and post-/decolonial approaches have long criticised the fact that human rights discourses employ problematic narrative strategies that lead to gendered and racist distortions, biases, and in- and exclusions. Against this background, the article will explore whether such problematic narratives are perpetuated in human rights discourses analysing and proposing policies to address climate change. Using a frame-analytical approach, the article will in particular focus on the concept of vulnerability which is a central, yet disputed concept in the human rights context. The article, firstly, highlights some of the most important critical insights of feminist and post-/decolonial approaches concerning human rights by carving out three problematic narrative strategies that are discernible in this context. In a next step, it is elaborated how human rights documents on climate change rely on the concept of vulnerability and what are the implications of the frame, id est the narrative and the metaphor, of vulnerability in the human rights context. It is further analysed how the vulnerability frame supports problematic narrative strategies which were carved out in the beginning of the article. The article ends with a summary and a discussion of the most important insights.

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