International Epistemic Communities and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment: The genesis of a new international norm, 1972-2021

On the afternoon of October 8, 2021 the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted Resolution 48/13 recognising for the first time at the global level the “human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment”. This document was preceded by a joint statement by 15 UN entities to the HRC and a letter signed by more than 1,100 civil society, child, youth and indigenous peoples organizations, “urgently calling for global recognition, implementation and protection” of this third generation human right. This dissertation project is the first to examine the transnational intellectual history of environmental human rights. The project starts from the guiding premise that besides the state actors and International Organizations, there are NGOs, scientists and other professional experts that form broader epistemic communities which, in turn, significantly shape and influence not only transnational societal discourses, but also international political processes. I will apply and potentially refine the conceptual framework of epistemic communities as developed by Peter M. Haas to better understand the role of these different actors and their interaction in the development of a new environmental human right. Subdivided into three parts, the project examines (1) the evolution of the human right to a healthy environment, (2) the role of expert communities in this process and their influence on transnational social discourses and international policymaking, as well as their interaction with agents such as IO’s, NGO’s and state actors. In addition, the project examines (3) the more specific role of Fatma Z. Ouhachi-Vesely, first UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment in the 1990s, as well as her successors, John Knox (2012-2018) and David Boyd (since 2018) in the development of this human right. The project’s ambition is to understand the origins and contours of the human right to a healthy environment and thus contribute, at a more general level, to a greater historical understanding of the way in which new international norms emerge. Another aim is to analyse the actual influence of epistemic communities on international policy-making and transnational social discourses, and to open up the field of historical research at the intersection of environmentalism and human rights. Given the inter- and transnational character of my research subject, perspective and methodology, the project is grounded primarily in transnational and global history, yet will also make appropriate use of the toolkit of historical discourse analysis, gender history, and the history of international relations.