Rights as Usual

This post by Dr Flávia do Amaral Vieira is part of the Symposium: The Many Faces of Human Rights: Revisiting Imperialist Legacies? Dr do Amaral Vieira is a research fellow for the project Imperialism, Business & Human Rights, hosted at Tilburg University.

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Recently, the expansion of renewable energy projects and the extraction of critical minerals for the so-called ‘green economy’ have emerged as central themes in academic research, public policy, and climate litigation, especially due to the growing documentation of how these activities affect local communities, whose perspectives and circumstances are rarely considered, especially in the Global South.

To address these challenges, the concept of a ‘just transition’ has gained traction. Originating from labour movements, it has become central to international climate debate. Within multilateral climate governance, the concept was enshrined in the preamble of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Broadly, it aims to integrate social, environmental, and climate justice into the transition to low-carbon economies, placing equity and human rights at the centre and rejecting market-driven “solutions” that reproduce colonial dynamics and deepen socio-environmental harm.

This is especially important in the case of implementation of renewable energy projects, that often involve large corporations and result in serious socio-environmental impacts and human rights violations. These initiatives risk reinforcing commodity dependence and territorial conflicts, running counter to climate justice principles.

Considering how the world today is shaped by corporate power where cases of corporate-related human rights violations are widespread—researching just transition processes offers a valuable opportunity to bridge two key areas of my work: the role of law and policy in shaping responses to the climate crisis, and the broader field of business and human rights. After all, achieving a just transition entails structural transformations that will materialize through infrastructure and the actions of corporations, investors, and other private actors – who often generate adverse social and environmental impacts that must be addressed through robust governance and accountability mechanisms.

From a Global South perspective, especially in Latin America, transitions risk deepening marginalization for communities historically excluded from global decision-making. Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and other racialized groups often bear the brunt of environmental and economic transformations, without having a meaningful input. These groups turn to human rights discourse to strengthen their struggle for land rights, autonomy and access to reparations for the harm they have suffered due to colonial legacies rooted in predatory extractivism, which continue to shape their lived realities today. It is this face of human rights that I explore here.

After all, a core question of climate justice is: who bears the cost of energy transition? What is owed to communities affected by wind farms, hydroelectric dams, or biomass plants—especially when projects proceed without consent or fair compensation? Policy decisions around such projects can reinforce existing inequalities or create entirely new ones. That’s why a Just Transition must be rooted in the realities of affected communities and guided by a vision of systemic change.

What Does a Just Transition Mean in Latin America?

Latin America—particularly Brazil—holds a strategic role in the global economy. Historically centered on commodity exports, the heavy concentration of these industries has turned vast areas into “sacrifice zones” for local populations, not without resistance. While framed as development, these projects often ignore human rights demands as obstacles to progress. Scholars such as Maristella Svampa and Arturo Escobar highlight how extractivism entrenches asymmetries. While commodities flow smoothly through global value chains, the environmental destruction and erosion of community life remain rooted in the territories where extraction occurs. As César Rodríguez-Garavito has compellingly argued, the socio-environmental conflicts that emerge in these contexts resemble “minefields” in which communities are forced to navigate constant threats to their rights, lands, and very survival. In this context, the role of corporations is still often ignored, enabling corporate capture of public policy and regulation. When energy transitions lack political critique, they risk legitimizing ongoing extractivism under the guise of “green” development.

A genuinely just transition requires recognizing that countries and communities are not equally positioned to shift toward low-carbon economies. Vast material disparities—economic, technological, and political—reflect enduring colonial legacies and global power asymmetries. Addressing these disparities means confronting the historical responsibilities of those most accountable for climate change and initiating meaningful efforts around reparations, capacity-building, and equitable redistribution.

While industrialized nations pursue “green growth” strategies to decarbonize their economies, these often rely on resource extraction and supply chains rooted in the Global South, perpetuating, as already mentioned, dependency and reinforcing historical injustices. Far from being neutral, the renewable energy has frequently resulted in the displacement of local communities, particularly through the construction of hydroelectric dams, large-scale wind farms, and intensified mining for critical minerals. In regions where economies depend heavily on commodity exports and where land ownership remains deeply unequal, this dynamic tends to benefit national elites and rent-seeking behavior—rather than promote equity or sustainability.

The World Bank’s 2020 report on the mineral intensity of the energy transition predicted that the demand for key minerals like graphite and lithium could increase by over 500%. This is already evident in places like the Atacama Desert in Chile, where lithium extraction has severely impacted Indigenous communities and ecosystems. In Brazil, a mapping of conflicts related to the energy transition revealed that, the extraction of transition minerals grew by 39% over the past decade, compared to a 9.3% increase in the overall mining sector (in real terms). The study identified 342 instances of conflict involving critical minerals between 2020 and 2023. In many cases, the energy transition on the ground is less about justice or energy democracy and more about replacing one extractive model with another.

This growing demand for minerals and the expansion of energy projects highlights a fundamental tension: while international frameworks increasingly recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples, these rights are routinely ignored or undermined in practice. International instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 emphasize the rights to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) and meaningful participation in decisions that affect their lands, territories, and resources. Despite this, implementation remains weak, and these rights are often sidelined in large-scale infrastructure and energy projects.

On the other hand, since the 1970s, efforts have been made at the United Nations level to establish international mechanisms to address the human rights impact of corporate activities. A significant development came in 2011, when the UN Human Rights Council endorsed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), now recognized as the most prominent global framework in this field. The UNGPs are characterized by their non-binding nature and reliance on voluntary adherence, offering general guidelines for preventing and addressing adverse human rights impacts linked to business activities but fall short of establishing enforceable obligations.

Just Transition governance: Still an Open Debate

At the international level, within the multilateral climate agenda, the concept of a Just Transition has gained increasing preeminence, especially after its inclusion in the preamble of the Paris Agreement (2015). The issue gained momentum at COP24 (Poland) with the adoption of the Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, signaling political commitment to addressing the social dimensions of climate change and mitigation policies.

Nonetheless, the declaration remains non-binding, and implementation efforts are limited, as the core challenge lies in turning Just Transition into an operational framework within the UNFCCC. Recent negotiations at COP28 (Dubai) and in the lead-up to COP29 (Baku) reflect this ongoing impasse: the Just Transition Work Programme has yet to reach consensus on whether it will serve as a financial and technical support mechanism or establish normative principles such as participation, equity, and the protection of vulnerable groups.

This governance gap mirrors broader challenges found in the business and human rights agenda, which is similarly constrained by soft law instruments and the lack of effective accountability and reparation mechanisms. Without addressing these limitations, the Just Transition risks remaining a rhetorical ideal rather than a transformative framework grounded in justice. These challenges raise important expectations for COP30, which will be held in Belém do Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon—where high levels of civil society participation are anticipated, particularly from groups demanding greater inclusion in the decision-making spaces traditionally reserved for official negotiators.

While the lack of effective governance remains a persistent issue, the concept of a just transition has been gradually appropriated by corporate actors. As companies become increasingly present in official climate negotiation spaces, they have contributed to diluting the notion into pricing schemes and market-based mechanisms—detaching it from its foundations in labor struggle and environmental justice.

Here, I explored the face of human rights that is mobilized as both discourse and tool by groups that are commonly excluded from participatory decision-making processes—particularly Indigenous peoples in Latin America—within the context of the global race for energy transition. In this context, and in light of ongoing attempts at greenwashing, it is essential to reclaim and redefine the meaning of a ‘just’ transition. This involves re-grounding it in labor organizing, environmental justice, and collective rights, while embedding its core principles across all levels of political decision-making—from local communities to national policies and international agreements. A truly just transition must foster systemic resilience that addresses political, economic, social, and ecological dimensions alike. This includes creating participatory mechanisms that elevate local knowledge and community-driven proposals within climate-related decision-making processes—ensuring that the transition is not only green, but rooted on the ground, fair and transformative.