This project explores the effectiveness of legal, institutional, and political mechanisms for realizing human rights in natural resources that invoke sustainability concerns. To date, scholarly approaches to human rights and natural resources have remained largely separate, despite the social and behavioral dimensions of sustainability and the resource dimensions of human rights claims. This project integrates these perspectives in order to enrich human rights scholarship and sustainability research, illuminating the dynamics and complexity of human-nature interactions. Using archival research, comparative-historical analysis, interviews, and quantitative analysis, this project analyzes the mechanisms, actors, and pathways by which human rights and sustainability goals might be fulfilled. Three megacities were chosen as the sites for analysis because of the extreme governance challenges they face due to the confluence of rapid urbanization, illegal housing, migration, poverty, inequality, and water scarcity. All of these factors fundamentally affect public health, social equity, and the environment. Research objectives include documenting and evaluating the role of legal and non-legal mechanisms in realizing human rights and sustainability norms for water and sanitation; evaluating the role of state and non-state actors in implementing social rights; and identifying and comparatively analyzing configurations of mechanisms and pathways across research sites and sectors to see when and how they operate more or less effectively. An important outcome will be the identification of practical strategies for making social rights real in places where it is difficult to do so.
The policy significance of rights to natural resources gives the project substantial broader impacts. Findings will be made available to respondents as well as to international development agencies via a web portal and in-country presentations. The project will also expand international research networks, foster curricular development at home and abroad, and expose U.S. students to cross-national research.
