ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how climate change is articulated as a social product of discursive struggles, as well as how rights structure our relationship with nature and with "relations of power, trust, responsibility, and care." Since the mid-2000s, the discourse of human rights has become increasingly prominent within the international climate change regime. Policy making thus requires the construction of social phenomena in ways that render them intelligible and amenable to resolution, and the types of solutions envisioned depend upon the ways in which phenomena are formulated through discourse. Different social understandings of human societies' relationship to the natural world constituted by and expressed through discourse, will produce tangible consequences in the form of policies, laws and regulations determining the protection or exploitation of natural resources and the environment. The basic entities stressed in human rights discourse are individual human beings – viewed as the unit of moral concern, regardless of their geographic location, nationality or other characteristics.
