No governing international text or generally accepted doctrine defines the procedure to be applied by international courts and tribunals. Yet these institutions’ tasks pose common challenges: providing notice of a dispute, defining its nature and scope, determining the legal rules, marshalling and assessing evidence, finding facts and applying legal rules to them, and then recording and communicating the result. There often is substantial similarity – indeed, convergence – in how courts and tribunals go about these tasks. This chapter examines some of the factors and institutions that contribute to this procedural harmonization among institutions dealing with disputes between parties from different countries and legal cultures. It looks at the shared historical foundations of important procedural practices, the influence of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, the roles individuals sometimes play in transmitting “legal technology” between institutions, and the effect of competition among institutions seeking to meet the needs of their “customers.” It also notes areas where procedure can diverge, as users look for new ways to address procedural problems.

This chapter introduces the concept of Temporal Focal Points in explaining change in international institutions. In doing so, it elaborates theoretically the arguments contained in the introductory chapter. It models the coordination challenge facing states as a stag hunt game, where international actors can all benefit if they are able to cooperate. In hunting stag – or, engaging in institutional change efforts – actors can move to a Pareto-superior, payoff-dominant equilibrium. The challenge that they face is that if they hunt stag and others do not, they will expend scarce assets and end up significantly worse off. The risk of acting cooperatively when others do not leads actors to persist at inferior, risk-dominant equilibria. This can change suddenly, however, when actors reach a temporal convergence of expectations. The convergence is often facilitated by the arrival of Temporal Focal Points. The heightened probability of successful coordination leads to sharp increases in political and analytical investments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodology and case selection.

Access to affordable water and sanitation services is crucial for the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Where these services are available but not affordable, people will not be able to use sufficient amounts of water and adequately maintain latrines, or will turn to cheaper, unsafe sources or practices. Another consequence is that people, in order to support the costs of water and sanitation, might compromise the realization of other human rights such as food, housing, health or education. However, the issue of affordability does not always receive the attention it deserves. As people will go to great lengths to pay for water to ensure their survival and health, there is often an assumption that people will obtain the water they need even without the state support.

This chapter examines the nature of the obligation of states to progressively realize the human rights to water and sanitation, aiming at informing public policies on the operationalization of that obligation. Even with more than one decade since the General Assembly explicitly recognized water and sanitation as a human right, it is often not clear how to unpack the generality of the obligation of progressive realization of human rights, particularly in the era of the 2030 Agenda. Both the SDGs and the progressive realization obligation have been criticized for being aspirational goals, the former because of the significant margins of discretion given to each state to set their own national targets and the latter because it is viewed as vague, having no defined time frame or pace of implementation and therefore not imposing a clear positive obligation on states (Porter, 2015).

Even when they are not directly related to the provision of water and sanitation services, business activities can be an important driver for the realization or, more frequent, violation of the HRtWS. The different ways those economic activities engage in development projects can affect the way people, notably traditional communities, access water and sanitation services. Usually, when confronting the economic and social benefits of those projects with the human rights risks for the affected communities, the mainstream narrative overestimates the former and makes the latter invisible. Among those business activities, megaprojects have a prominent role in terms of concerns for the HRtWS.

This chapter focuses on the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Rio “Earth Summit.” It shows how, despite incentives to address institutional dysfunction and mounting global environmental problems by institutionalizing sustainable development within the United Nations system, divergent expectations persisted until momentum built toward UNCED. The Rio conference, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference, emerged as a Temporal Focal Point in United Nations environmental politics. Convergent expectations triggered a significant increase in political and analytical investments in change processes from state and non-state actors, leading to a transformation of the informational and political context. These investments produced significant institutional change, including the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the institutionalization of the World Bank-operated Global Environment Facility. States also launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a set of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

Policies are the instrument that governments mobilize for carrying out their intentions to interfere in reality, transforming their vision for the development of the territories they encompass into reality, whether on a national, local or supralocal scale. Several definitions have been proposed for the concept, with the following being suitable for the purposes of this publication: “a process, which involves decisions on the part of governmental bodies and authorities, and actions, carried out by an actor or a group of actors, which consists of goals and the means to achieve them” (Heller & Castro, 2007).

Different studies in the human rights sector and in the water and sanitation sector have explored the concept of accountability and aimed to formulate how the concept might be applied to the specificities of the sector. However, there is no widely understood or agreed definition of the concept, in particular in the context of the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Therefore, clarification of the concept is essential for that sector, which involves a variety of actors related to the realization of those rights, including government entities (i.e., central and local governments and regulators), international organizations, transnational and national corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There is also a feeling that a strong accountability benefits the improved access to water and sanitation services.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development contains a broad set of goals requiring unprecedented global commitment and cooperation between countries (United Nations, 2015d, 2015e). From the human rights perspective, the agenda reflects elements of international human rights law and offers critical opportunities to further advance the realization of human rights for all people everywhere without discrimination (OHCHR, n.d.-c). The challenge posed is to ensure that strategies and policies to implement the 2030 Agenda are effectively based on the established human rights framework. Goal 17 of the Agenda refers to strengthening the means of implementation and “revitalizing the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.” Several targets of Goal 17 aim at the full implementation of official development assistance by developed countries, reaching certain proportions of aid relative to gross national income.

The law of the sea is a great laboratory for observing the fabric of international law through the interactions between a variety of judicial bodies with jurisdiction to interpret and apply the same legal rules and principles. At first, the plurality of judicial fora available under UNCLOS has created concerns of fragmentation and of competition and forum shopping. These have proved so far unwarranted, since the tribunals generally deliver a uniform interpretation of the applicable law or tend at least toward harmonization. Tribunals have aimed to achieve clarity and consistency of the case law as well as transparency and predictability of the delimitation process. The concept of acquis judiciaire has been used to designate this mechanism of gradual building of a uniform law through the reiteration and cross-referral to existing judicial decisions. It is both a concept and a regulatory tool. It underlies a wilful search of harmonization and shows that judges are essential actors for ensuring the coherence of the international legal system.