Volume 20: Issue | Numéro 1 (2024)
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.
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.
Lynda Hubert Ta
Dans un contexte de crise écologique et d’effervescence internationale pour tenter d’y remédier, cet article se penche, suivant une perspective historique, sur l’évolution de la protection internationale de la biodiversité. Il a pour objectif d’examiner et de comprendre, à partir d’une analyse essentiellement doctrinale complétée par une analyse des plus récents textes internationaux, les diverses conceptions de la biodiversité ainsi que les valeurs qui lui ont été octroyées, au fil des stratégies globales déployées en vue de sa protection. L’origine et l’évolution de ces stratégies et approches de protection ont effectivement été marquées par différents courants de pensée fondées sur certaines valeurs. Ces stratégies et approches ne sont donc pas neutres. Ainsi, il ressort de l’examen effectué que les approches utilitaristes, fondées sur les valeurs instrumentales de la biodiversité, ont historiquement été priorisées, en particulier dans le cadre international moderne de protection de la biodiversité. Cela favorise une protection soumise aux impératifs de croissance, suscitant des questionnements quant à l’adéquation de ce cadre en vue d’une protection appropriée de la biodiversité. L’article s’attarde de façon factuelle, historique et même philosophique sur la longue tradition de protection internationale de la biodiversité, afin d’en comprendre les fondements. Comment cette protection a été historiquement saisie, organisée et mise en œuvre à l’échelle internationale et quels en sont les effets sur le cadre international de protection actuel?
Jennifer Beth Spiegel
On September 28, 2021, a decision by Justice Thompson not to renew the extension on an interlocutory injunction designed to prevent disruption from anti-logging protests in Fairy Creek, British Columbia made national headlines in Canada. This ruling would later be reversed on appeal. Meanwhile, trials are ongoing against Indigenous and non-Indigenous people accused of blocking access to the worksites of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project between 2018 and 2021 in breach of a court injunction requested by the oil and gas company. Moreover, national debates continue in the wake of violent mass arrests of Wet’suwet’en Nation members in the winter of 2020 and the fall of 2021 for breach of a court injunction intended to allow a pipeline to be built through their territories despite persistent resistance. This paper examines the current debates concerning interlocutory injunction law in cases of land-use disputes and the competing understandings of legality and rule of law that underpin them. Specifically, the paper critically assesses the social and cultural biases that underpin current tests used for granting and enforcing injunctive relief. It then argues for an approach to land-related conflicts and the defence of legality that take into account commitments to environmental justice and reconciliation, currently sidelined by the use of interlocutory injunctions and the related criminalization of land defence.