Chapter XXVI of Rio Plus 20 Document by Cho Tab Khen Zambuling (Alfredo Sfeir-Younis)
XXVI. Collective Rights and Responsibilities
A clean environment is a human right. It is an individual as well as a collective right. Global warming is violating these rights and we have to reflect deeply upon this situation. However, all rights are accompanied by responsibilities. There are no rights without responsibilities. To articulate better this position in public policy making -dominated by economics and finance issues—is not an easy task. Given the plethora of organizations, and their forms of governance, addressing global warming may end up being atomized to the point that little action would take place. Therefore, one needs to bring about a “supra goal” (an eminent reason) capable of uniting and bringing all the above organizations together into strong and concerted actions.
We believe that such a “supra goal” (or eminent reason) should be the empowerment of “collective rights and responsibilities”. Once again, this will bring us back to the explicit recognition of the critical importance of understanding our life as a human collective. This is to say, in relation to other living beings’ collective and nature’s collective. Thus, the issue facing us today is not just one of having the right to live in a clean and healthy environment as an individual, but also as a collective. And, the jurisprudence and justifiability of this collective right must be nurtured and enforced, so that we have no cases where individual rights override our collective rights. This idea of collective rights represents a major departure from many of the debates and discussions we have had in relation to traditional “human rights”. Generally speaking, the traditional instruments to get acted upon those collective rights have been treaties, international agreements, conventions, etc. While some of them have shown high levels of effectiveness in securing our collective rights, their ‘unit of account’ is still far from being collective. At best, these use the ‘governments’ as the unit of account –still an individualistic concept. To enforce those instruments, some level of responsibility has been given to existing international organizations. Also, new administrative bodies have been created in many instances. Nevertheless, there is neither collective collateral nor collective sharing of rights and responsibilities.
We are fully aware that the restructuring of these collective rights demands a new set of values and institutional arrangements. May be, these are difficult to even conceive under the international governance system we possess now. However, as a first step, one is to move into a new set of values, many of which have already been listed in a previous chapter; e.g., cooperation, respect for nature, inclusion, interdependence, interconnectedness, collective empowerment, meaningful participation and more. The existence of collective rights is becoming mandatory. It is not only about global warming. These collective rights would apply to practically every aspect of our global environmental management. These collective rights will apply to any human activity that presents a “public good” character. Thus, such right would even apply to the management of the global financial markets, where ‘financial stability’ should be considered a form of public good.
Clearly, the notion of collective rights must be carefully worked out, to be properly applied to the case of global warming. This may imply new alternative administration schemes or new forms of governance, in order to implement and enforce the collective right. However, collective rights must go hand in hand with collective responsibilities. These are not to be camouflaged behind some general statements of intent. These responsibilities must be identified with specific actors and groups in society that must embrace those rights and responsibilities. As it has been the major theme of this book, for collective rights and responsibilities to become a reality in addressing global warming, one would need a high level of consciousness and coherence. Otherwise, everything will remain just as another interesting desire or intent.
High levels of human consciousness are required to maintain the unity and holistic nature of the collective values and goals we are to serve and fulfill. Otherwise, we will experience a ‘break-down’ in the whole process of enactment and the actual realization of those rights and responsibilities. Societies will remain at the level of good intentions, but with no real capacity to self-realize those collective rights or assume those collective responsibilities. As a consequence, a major effort is to be made to increase the levels of our collective consciousness. And, in this regard, media and education will play a fundamental role. This is in addition to what we can do at our individual level through the practices of contemplative techniques and other effective ways to increase consciousness and coherence. If these collective rights and responsibilities are not in place, so that actors act in a particular way, humanity will face what is known as the “Tragedy of the Commons”. In particular, we will see that global warming will create lots of suffering and will diminish human welfare in many parts of the world.
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