Human rights are widely recognised as protecting against ‘standard threats’ to human dignity. In previous work I have argued that, insofar as environmental degradation is only contingently recognised as a ‘standard threat’ – i.e., as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change rather than as an inherent vulnerability and necessary feature of the human condition – then human beings are not coded in human rights frameworks as ecologically embedded beings. Further, I have argued, this has troubling implications for the appropriateness of the human rights framework as a conceptual framework for understanding urgent moral and political issues as a whole, not just environmental ones. Yet, there are clearly strategic reasons for utilising human rights legal practices in defending environmental goods. Moreover, widespread claims that human rights are neo-imperialist and neo-colonial are somewhat complicated by the manifest strategic use of human rights law and rhetoric by a range of Global South actors.
In this paper, I return to the concept of humans as ecologically embedded beings and further develop the possibilities of this for a radically ecological conception of human rights in light of (i) the strategic use of human rights by contemporary Indigenous and ecofeminist activist movements in Latin America and (ii) recent cases in which legal personhood has been claimed for non-human entities. I argue that the embrace of a conferralist understanding of human rights practice (in contrast to a ‘foundationalist’ approach) offers a promising way of navigating both some issues around neo-colonialism and simultaneously embracing the legal, economic and political implications of understanding the human as necessarily ecologically embedded. Nevertheless, I also reflect on the limitations of adopting the conferralist approach, namely, that it arguably leaves too much open to contestation.
Dr Kerri Woods is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Deputy Head of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. She is author of Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability (2010, Elgar) and Human Rights (Palgrave, 2014) and is currently co-editing, with Jesse Tomalty, The Routledge Handbook for the Philosophy of Human Rights (Routledge, 2025).
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