Sébastien Jodoin

Urban scholars are increasingly calling for greater attention to care, as both a practice and ethic, in response to socio-environmental issues. In the urban transportation literature, care has helped to underscore uneven mobility patterns and the need for inclusive planning frameworks. Likewise, urban political ecology perspectives have foregrounded care by examining the everyday practices, ethical relations and uneven labour through which urban environments are sustained, contested or made livable. While discussions on gender and care inequities are gaining prominence in these fields, this literature has tended to neglect people with disabilities and the role of their leadership and care relations in the movement for sustainable urban transitions. This provocation paper brings the literature on care-full transitions into conversation with critical disability theory and activism. We do so through a specific focus on two large-scale transformations reshaping public transportation in the United States: the retrofitting of legacy subway systems and the roll-out of micro-transit services. In light of ongoing issues of universal inaccessibility and disability exclusion, we underscore the importance of working to address disabling environments and adopting an ethic of care that honours the leadership of disability communities in the transition to sustainable urban ecologies.

We provide the first systematic analysis of whether, how, and to what extent people with disabilities and their human rights are included in two subsets of climate policies adopted by 195 parties to the Paris Agreement. We found that only 41 parties mention people with disabilities in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), whereas only 75 do so in their adaptation policies. Moreover, these references are rarely accompanied by concrete measures to include people with disabilities, their rights, or their knowledge in climate decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that states are generally not abiding by their obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of persons with disabilities under international and domestic law. This exposes people with disabilities to climate-related harm and reinforces, rather than disrupts, the inequities they face in societies around the world. It also fails to harness the multiple benefits associated with a disability-inclusive approach to climate action.

Our article offers an in-depth account of the role of the transnational practices of collaboration, storytelling, and learning in the diffusion of rights-based climate litigation (RBCL). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and quantitative data, we trace how the performance of these practices by lawyers, litigants, communities, scholars, and NGOs have fostered and sustained the transnational generation, exchange, and flow of resources, relationships, narratives, and knowledge underlying the field of RBCL. We argue that all three practices have fostered the diffusion of RBCL by influencing the local determinants of legal mobilization through enabling, discursive, and relational pathways. Finally, we show that these practices have had structural effects that have shaped the ideas and identities of the practitioners in the field of RBCL. Over time, the discursive and relational dimensions of practices have given rise to and have been strengthened by the formation of multiple communities of practice. The emergence of distinct communities provides the possibility for deeper forms of socialization and acculturation among their members, but they also make conflict and competition between different communities more likely. Overall, our article emphasizes the importance of understanding legal mobilization for climate justice as a set of practices that are shaped by the transnational social-legal context in which they are performed.

For humanity and the Earth, it is crucial that present institutions learn to respect and honor the rights of future generations and to consider the needs of those who are yet to come. The rights of future generations are starting to be recognized as an essential part of policy decisions and even as a legal requirement in an increasing number of countries. Indeed, some countries and communities have begun to design innovative instruments to represent the voices of future generations in their policy-making processes, and to better realize these rights. The need to respect and realize the rights of future generations has also been adopted by the international community through treaty law and through the jurisprudence of eminent courts and tribunals such as the ICJ. Indeed, the UNGA now considers the rights of future generations in its global deliberations, and several proposals have been generated among experts for the creation of new international instruments to represent the voices of future generations in global policy making. Perhaps the most concrete form of policy guidance, and arguably the most visible place, for future generations in the UN context is the 2015 SDGs. At this point in time, it is helpful to summarize and analyze the new domestic and international institutions that work to deliver on the rights of future generations. Indeed, surveying the more progressive national innovations and the principal international trends in this domain make new options possible for policy makers wishing to establish novel instruments to adequately protect the rights of future generations at national and international levels.

Cet article interroge le rôle que peut jouer le droit du handicap dans la lutte au changement climatique. En nous appuyant sur la Convention des Nations Unies relative aux droits des personnes handicapées, nous précisons les obligations des États envers les personnes handicapées dans le domaine des changements climatiques. Nous expliquons également que la vulnérabilité accrue des personnes handicapées dans la crise climatique résulte de l’interaction entre les incapacités des individus et les barrières institutionnelles, économiques, comportementales et environnementales auxquels ils sont confrontés dans la société. Nous présentons ensuite les résultats d’une analyse systématique de la protection des droits des personnes handicapées dans le contexte des politiques climatiques adoptées autour du monde. Enfin, nous terminons par une présentation des contentieux climatiques liés aux droits des personnes handicapées. Nous suggérons que des solutions climatiques inclusives du handicap sont non seulement essentielles pour protéger les droits et la dignité des personnes handicapées, mais qu’elles pourraient permettre à une plus grande partie de la population de contribuer à l’émergence de sociétés sobres en carbone et d’améliorer leur résilience climatique.