About the project
The dual challenge of multidimensional poverty and an ecological crisis facing humanity requires a rethinking about the role of human rights in creating a meaningful human existence within the carrying capacity of the planet. The right to sustainable development (RtSD) is a recognised right in the African human rights system, but due to the lack of normative and legal elaboration of its content, nature, and obligations, as well as its relationship with other human rights, it is not a right that has to date been extensively relied on or operationalised by civil society, states or human rights bodies.
This study hypothesises that the realisation of a RtSD will contribute to empowering local communities with a right to sustainable utilisation of their natural resources and to make decisions for non-extractive driven paths of development, while placing ecological and social limits on the power of governments and corporations to undertake economic development. In giving effect to the RtSD, courts and tribunals would also be more at liberty to decide whether specific development projects should go forward at all, based on the overarching duty that development should contribute to people’s wellbeing and based on the cumulative economic, social and environmental impacts, seeking ways to integrate these considerations, rather than weighing them up against each other.
The RtSD also serves a normative role to understand what is wrong with the way development is undertaken today, where the environment and the most vulnerable people subsidise economic progress.
Objectives
Contributing to pressing global academic and policy debates about the respective roles and inter-relationship between sustainable development and human rights, this study aims to answer the questions (1) to what extent the RtSD is recognised and given content at African regional and global levels, and (2) to assess how this right may be operationalised.
The first part of the study takes the form of a doctrinal analysis and mapping exercise of the explicit and implicit recognition of the RtSD, with a focus on its normative content and the obligations it imposes on duty bearers. The second part comprises case studies of African constitutional and jurisprudential recognition of the RtSD in Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, in order to clarify how this right has been developed through national law and analysing its potential for future operationalisation.
Selected publications
- E Boshoff ‘Rethinking the premises underlying the right to development in African human rights jurisprudence’ (2021) Review of European, Comparative, and International Environmental Law (RECIEL) Special Issue 1–11 https://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12423
