Editorial: Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice

Abstract

Framesmatter. They bring into view, interpret and – in a significant sense materialize – bring into mattering – a set of assumptions, interpretations and practices of circumscription that shape (and interact with), as Gitlin puts it, ‘what exists, what happens and what matters’. Moreover, frames matter for law. They determine the conditions under which problems are apprehended by law, and thus can influence the assertion of authority, jurisdiction and institutional responsibility over particular issues. Frames are central to this issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, their significance is apparent, overtly or tacitly, in each contribution. The frames discernible in the contributions are dynamic, emergent, and contested by counter-frames. It is clear that frames can take hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions depending on their location in the emergent energies and contestations at stake in the field in which they function as shape-givers. Frames signal intensities of both focus and of action/inaction, and it seems clear that every framing inevitably involves selection, if not pre-selection – and in that, represents an exercise of power. Contestation, between frames, between the ideological commitments that can underwrite them, between communities and movements both semiotic and material, are also present in this issue. Contestation perhaps inevitably underwrites key contemporary tensions surrounding the dense entanglements between humans and non-humans and convergent and divergent forces, energies and futures in the climate-pressed posthuman ecology of the Anthropocene. In ‘Contesting human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council’, M Joel Voss is explicit about the centrality and power of framing – and of contestation – in his analysis. The context for Voss’s analysis is provided by discussions concerning the relationship between human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council. Noting how hotly contested the issues are and how fraught the discussions become, Voss conducted participant observation of climate change resolutions at the Council between 2006 and 2019 in order to expose the rival framings of climate change enlivened in the discourses of state participants. Drawing on Payne’s work on framing, persuasion and norm-contestation, Voss conceptualizes frames in a way that implies, to our mind, their operation as modes of organizing power: they provide, after all, ‘a singular interpretation of a particular