“Environmental defenders”

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the terms "environmental defenders", "land defenders" and "environmental human rights defenders" have gained currency among NGOs, media and UN agencies. This has coincided with the development of an international infrastructure encompassing prizes, resolutions and resources to support and acknowledge defenders and their causes. However, the uptake of the term "environmental defenders" and related notions has been uneven across geographical areas, languages and those considered defenders. Listening to the voices of this last group themselves, this chapter considers two questions. First, it explores the connotations of the term "environmental defenders" and examines to what extent it corresponds to the ways those labelled in this way see and identify themselves and their work. Second, it looks at the ways in which the term empowers or, by contrast, disempowers, and the various advantages and drawbacks related to its use. We conclude by considering a number of ways in which those supporting or reporting on defenders can mitigate the inadvertent negative effects of the term, to which so far no alternative has emerged that is less contentious or better captures the heterogeneous groups that it designates.

Women environmental human rights defenders in Nepal and the Philippines: unpacking the (mal)development–disaster risk relationship through lived experiences

“…This study focuses on "environmental human rights defenders", which encompasses many realities varying across geographies and political contexts, social classes and languages (Martinez-Alier, 2003;UN Environment Programme, 2018;Verweijen et al, 2021). Environmental human rights defenders are often qualified as such by external actors (including media, civil society and academics), while they would not necessarily call themselves that (Verweijen et al, 2021).…”

“…This study focuses on "environmental human rights defenders", which encompasses many realities varying across geographies and political contexts, social classes and languages (Martinez-Alier, 2003;UN Environment Programme, 2018;Verweijen et al, 2021). Environmental human rights defenders are often qualified as such by external actors (including media, civil society and academics), while they would not necessarily call themselves that (Verweijen et al, 2021). For instance, Martinez-Alier (2003) notes the difference between environmentalism of the poor -where environmental protection by poor people, mainly in rural areas, is a necessity to safeguard the natural resources on which their livelihoods are dependent -and environmentalism of the rich -where people who have their primary needs covered engage in ecological action in a more conscious and sometimes professional way.…”

Coloniality and Necropolitics in the Age of COVID-19: The Question of Palestine

“…The stark socioeconomic stratification in the OPT (particularly the West Bank) manifests not only in better life and health outcomes in general for the affluent minority, but in very different relationships to the Israeli state and coloniality more broadly. As noted by political scientist Jeanne Perrier (2021), the PA often acts directly against the interests of Palestinians themselves by employing the same tactics as the Israeli state uses in order to achieve the ends of a precarious and uncertain quasi-statehood. As Mark Muhannad Ayyash argues, it is because the PA seeks liberation through the formation of a state (which still relies on the colonial conceptions of linear time, bounded space, and the separation of life), “they were always bound to replicate the colonial system and indeed support it” (p. 23).…”