Human rights have become a principle and a value that have increasingly gained the support of various segments of society. Human rights are often associated with democracy, the rule of law, the civilizing process and human dignity. They are also associated with the idea that everyone, anywhere and regardless of their citizenship status, has basic rights, which must be respected by others and the state (see, among others, Sen, 2004).

A question frequently arises in the field of human rights as to why the rights do not become real, even when they are recognized in legal frameworks. More specifically, how to convert economic, social and cultural rights into concrete reality? Why do not the legal frameworks translate into equality, changing the circumstances of those living in vulnerable conditions? Or, more specifically, what are the conditions that favour or hinder the implementation of ESCR?

By the end of 2019, about 75.9 million people – 26 million refugees, 4.2 million asylum seekers and 45.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) – had been forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, armed conflict, other situations of violence or human rights violations (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2020). In addition, millions of migrants are forcibly displaced as a result of extreme poverty, discrimination, climate change, forced evictions and other situations.

This chapter introduces a new framework that analyzes the role of timing and temporality in international institutions and world politics. It describes the temporal coordination dilemmas facing international actors. The chapter details the challenges posed by gradually accumulating incentives to alter international institutions and by the large number of actors that must be brought into the picture if institutional change efforts are to succeed. In realizing major change, a large array of moving pieces must be synchronized at one point in time, entailing considerable complexity and transaction costs. Indeed, the political and analytical investments – both international and domestic in nature – involved in recasting institutions are very substantial. Actors’ willingness to incur a sharp increase in transaction costs depends on their expectations that others will engage in a parallel effort. Thus, even as incentives to alter institutions mount, the inertial drift of institutional life persists until actors are able to reach a temporal convergence of expectations. At that time, actors make substantial investments in change processes and alter fundamentally their bargaining behavior.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the state of United Nations environmental cooperation between 1963 and 1972, focusing extensively on the 1972 “Stockholm conference.” It shows how a gradual deterioration of the global environment since the Industrial Revolution produced growing incentives to increase the level of international cooperation in global environmental politics. These incentives lay unrealized for more than a decade, however, until momentum gathered in the lead-up to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The Stockholm conference, which became a landmark event, produced substantial institutional change, including a Declaration, Action Plan, and ultimately the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The conference, which was originally planned as a largely technical affair, gathered a momentum that was unanticipated by all when it was initially proposed. This momentum is explained by the emergence of a Temporal Focal Point triggered by a series of visible environmental incidents that highlighted long-standing institutional suboptimality. The Stockholm Temporal Focal Point was crystallized by an entrepreneurial conference secretariat led by Maurice Strong.

This chapter proposes a theoretical framework in which the absence or the presence of cross-fertilization depends on how a court and its judges strike the balance between the potential persuasive value of external citations and the potential concerns about deference that may arise from grounding decisions in external sources. It then tests observable implications from this theoretical perspective using a new data set of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) references to international court rulings and international legal materials. The findings generally support the theoretical framework. The ECtHR mentions external international law sources in 15 per cent of the judgments that engage in some form of new legal interpretation, but most of these references are to Council of Europe (CoE) documents or institutions, which are typically not controversial from a deference perspective. By contrast, the ECtHR cites international court judgments in only 3 per cent of its judgments and does so even more rarely in violation findings, which raise more deference concerns. The conclusion discusses the implications for other courts.

This chapter offers a new framework for theorizing about the roles of different types of actors who participate in processes of cross-fertilization. All of these actors have complex or mixed motives: while actors may place some value on the coherence of the international legal system, they weigh such systemic concerns against other, more immediate concerns. International judges, for example, may place value on the coherence of the international legal system, but they may place greater emphasis on the autonomy of their own specialized or regional legal order, on the normative values of that order and on their own authority within that order. Other actors, by contrast, may place little or no value on international legal coherence, but favor or oppose cross-fertilization as a function of its effect on the their likelihood of prevailing in a dispute. In a world of complex actor preferences, the process of cross-fertilization is likely to resemble, not a consensual process of management, but a constant struggle among a wide variety of actors, some of whom will champion cross-fertilization while others seek to prevent or limit it.

This chapter examines the post-1972 Stockholm conference phase of institution-building in global environmental governance from 1973 to 1982, with particular attention to the early development of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP, which was formally launched in December 1972, accumulated a mixed record in fostering global environmental cooperation. After analyzing UNEP’s early years, the chapter provides a detailed treatment of UNEP’s 1982 Governing Council “Session of a Special Character.” The “Nairobi conference,” much neglected in the literature, marked the 10th anniversary of UNEP and served a focal point for analysis of global environmental issues. Despite the efforts of UNEP’s Executive Director, Mostafa Tolba, international conditions had not opened up incentives sufficient to motivate significant institutional change in 1982. Thus, with a few minor adjustments, the institutional status quo prevailed following the Nairobi conference.

The human rights to water and sanitation (HRtWS) have their genesis, history and interpretations. They are also subject to tension, controversy and dispute. A studied approach to these foundations is necessary in order to ensure a basis for their formulation, implementation, evaluation and monitoring. For the approach to the three dimensions that make up the analytical framework used in this book, an understanding of these aspects is not only desirable but necessary. Understanding the factors involved in the realization or violation of HRtWS, the ways in which the policies actually reach them, to a greater or lesser degree, and the population groups at particular risk, pre-supposes clarity regarding the different approaches for the rights and the elements that underlie each of these. In this context, the objective of this part of the book is to provide elements for the reader to get a closer view of these fundamentals, to get a more complete understanding of the topic and, from there, to have a theoretical-conceptual basis to address drivers, policies and people.