Dissertation: Climate Democracy and Human Rights (Committee: Cristina Lafont, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, and Rachel Zuckert)

The pathologies of the system of global climate governance have slowly eroded its legitimacy in the eyes of environmental movements. In response, advocates have turned to domestic and international institutions outside the UNFCCC and, overtime, successfully reframed the climate crisis as a human rights issue. UN human rights bodies now affirm that climate change poses to the human rights to life, housing, adequate food and water, health, and to participate in cultural life, especially for women, children, people with disabilities, and Indigenous peoples. This growing reinterpretation of the climate crisis culminated in July 2025, with the historic advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJAO). The ICJAO recognized not only the human right to a clean and healthy environment, but also, the obligations of states to prevent further damage to the climate system, including by phasing out fossil fuels.

My dissertation aims to bring forth the normative and practical implications of this human rights framework for global climate governance. However, the idea that human rights supplies standards for institutions of global governance encounters great resistance among philosophers and legal scholars. Both international human rights law and the philosophy of human rights largely remains “state-centric” and focused on the behaviors of nation-states. Political thought has historically assumed that only nation-states can become democracies and, therefore, nation-states are responsible for realizing human rights within their territories and only within their territories. These presumptions may lead us to think that if our response to climate change is to be democratic, it must come from the nation-state, and if our response is to come from global governance, it cannot be democratic. Moreover, it has often been thought that if global governance is to safeguard human rights, it must place restrictions upon the democratically legitimate authority of nation-states, and if it is to respect the democratically legitimate authority of nation-states, it cannot safeguard human rights. Our tradition has left us with a set of dualisms which cannot be justly resolved.

The solution I wish to propose in this dissertation seeks to undo these dualisms. In my view, the movement for climate justice cannot abandon the internal relation between human rights and democracy. We cannot enjoy our human rights without democratic institutions. However, this relation should not lead us to “domesticate” the issue of climate change. Human rights are matters of international concern, and climate change is a global problem. We cannot address this crisis without effective systems of global climate governance. Since global climate governance must take on human rights-based responsibilities, it must democratize itself. I will therefore lay out a democratic conception of global climate governance which can inspire hope.