Sustainable development : Africa's hidden and not-so-hidden contribution to its law, politics, and history
Publisher
University of British Columbia
Date Issued
2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
Program
Law
Description
This dissertation is inspired by how international law obscures Third World knowledge in the evolution and the legal operationalisation of the concept of sustainable development. With complementary insights from legal history and sociology of law, this dissertation focuses on the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa’s contribution to the discourse on sustainable development law. It uses the analytical framework of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). As used in this research project, by “contribution” I mean a radical and critical resistance to the routine peripheralisation of African legal influences in international law. The dissertation analyses international law’s failure to account for Africa’s contribution to the evolution and operationalisation of sustainable development in international environmental law (IEL). Thus, driven by TWAIL, as well as disciplinary insights and borrowings from sociology of law and legal history, I analyse the emergence of sustainable development in international law, focusing on how its conceptual evolution and practical implementation influence Africa’s legal ideas and legal cosmologies. In this regard, this dissertation critiques Africa’s use of environmental rights as the primary vehicle for implementing sustainable development. By interrogating the failing role of environmental rights in Africa’s implementation of the concept’s legal dimensions, I am interested in extending the growing significance of turning to African customary law and other related Indigenous legal cosmologies as an alternative mode of revitalising and pursuing a context-specific meaning of the legal dimensions of sustainable development. This TWAIL-informed idea of a new environmental law emerging from African customary law and Indigenous conceptions of environmental law and governance is what I call ecological law. Ecological law seeks to retrench the anthropocentric dimensions of IEL and engender a particular appreciation of law that is constitutive of the primacy of ecological integrity to sustainable development by privileging ecological harmony between humanity and nature as a foundational principle. Thus, while this dissertation is undertaken within the context of Africa’s political geography, I am hopeful that the outcomes elicited from the analysis and the intervention this dissertation makes will illuminate blind spots in the global pursuit of the law on sustainable development.
Date Available
2025-01-31
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI
10.14288/1.0396454
Affiliation
Law, Peter A. Allard School of