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Abstract

This article delves into the intricate relationship between children’s rights and the broader landscape of human and more-than-human rights in times of planetary pluri-crises. While acknowledging the historical significance of the United Nation adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as a late 20th-century milestone, this contribution challenges the notion of treating children’s rights as a distinct right’s issue within the global context of ecological, social, economic and political turmoil. The article identifies three intensities around children’s rights within the ‘rights’ discourse to argue that ‘rights’ are always relational. Using a relational mapping informed approach to analysis, a series of three intensities is presented: a hierarchy of ‘rights’, doing ‘rights’ in the Anthropocene and thinking ‘rights’ in the context of pluri-crisis education. These intensities play across scales at local and planetary levels and highlight the urgency of reimagining children’s rights as relational with planetary rights. The article concludes with an imagined place-based scenario that explores how this mapping of intensities makes visible relational rights for early childhood education in times of climate crises in Australia, and beyond.

Keywords

children’s rights planetary rights early childhood education climate crisis

Introduction: Mapping the relationality of the ‘rights’

The UN adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) has been a 20th-century milestone for human rights and social justice. It continues to speak to the increasing awareness that children have specific contributions to make to their places and to the planet. Young people are some of the strongest advocates of climate change action and children in particular have much to gain from having their voices heard when it comes to decision-making that effect their future (Ziba, 2018). In relation to climate change education, there are global calls to urgent action, including action of climate justice. The world’s most senior statesman, United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres, is increasingly outspoken when it comes to climate justice, including justice for generations to come and justice for the planet. Antonio Guterres makes his views on the climate emergency clear when he states that in relation to the climate crisis ‘optimism is an illusion’ (Harvey, 2022). He echoes sociological critiques of 20th century faith in modernity’s belief in progress – there is no straightforward path into a better-than-the-present future and modernity’s optimism about better futures is misplaced for good (Beck, 2011). If we give up on optimism, as advised by Guterres, then this might mean we take a ‘realistic’ look at what is possible here and now. Children’s rights to a healthy future on a healthy planet are, realistically, unachievable in current climate change scenarios. This is a bleak and sobering outlook. But such an outlook also opens doors to a harder, closer and more pragmatic look at what can be achieved right now to work towards planetary climate justice that considers future generation. A pragmatic starting point is to take a look at children’s rights and their relevance to intergenerational climate justice.

Children’s rights are still not implemented globally and even if they are embedded in education systems through policy, such as curriculum principles, there is a lag in the political and social imagination when it comes to actualizing children’s rights across policies and in everyday life (Liebel, 2023). Often, rights are a matter of interpretation in local contexts. Rights of children to make decisions that count in their own lives are subordinate to adults’ perception of what is best for children, despite children’s explicit concerns about global issues. As pointed out in a recent study children’s and young people’s concerns are clearly noticeable at the societal level, for example in climate protests, even though their rights to participation may not be supported in local policy contexts. ‘While all too often children and young people are unaware of their participation rights under the UNCRC, they themselves have taken action on such issues as gun control, anti-war and climate change’ (McMellon and Tisdall, 2020: 157). The authors suggest that children’s rights may benefit from new concepts, such as child activism, children as advocates and rights defenders, children as protagonists and initiators of change. Such concepts could assist to generate new discourses and understandings of children and young people’s participation and contribution to their places and communities. This would be in line with global recommendations (Clark et al., 2020), including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It is in the public health space where the intersections of children’s rights and planetary rights are most visible. Health research with a focus on climate change explicitly articulates children’s rights in relation to the rights of living on a healthy planet (Chesney and Duderstadt, 2022) whereas education remains largely silent on the issue (Spiteri, 2022). It is perhaps not surprising that education as a human-centric discipline continues to focus on human rights rather than exploring the intersection between human and planetary rights. However, researchers argue that for climate change education a shift towards ecologically informed understandings that traverse the human-nature divide is essential (Duhn et al., 2017; Myrstad et al., 2022; Pollitt et al., 2021; Malone, 2017). Similarly, educational scholarship from postcolonial and Indigenous researchers emphasises the inseparability of human and more-than-human rights (Poelina et al., 2022; Huuki and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2023; Ritchie, 2021).

It is important to note that the concept of planetary rights is only starting to emerge as a policy possibility and much work has to be done to work through what planetary rights mean in practice. An example of policy shifts towards an inclusion of planetary rights is the Te Awa Tupua, the Whanganui River in New Zealand, who, after 140 years of struggle, must be treated as a living entity with its own rights. This fight for legal recognition of a more-than-human presence has been fought by local Māori (Roy, 2017). It is part of a new global politics, often initiated by Indigenous peoples, to protect the rights of nature by enshrining earth rights in legislation (Youatt, 2017). How this new global politic translates into everyday politics is another matter, as there are few examples of more-than-human legally recognized living entities with rights (Sterner et al., 2019). Rights are a feeble defence, as the dire record of protection of endangered species demonstrates. The right to protection depends on the recognition of, and respect for, rights and the ability of the entity to claim its rights. In common legislation a river cannot speak for itself. In common legislation a baby can also not speak for itself. It may be time for new planetary ethics that reconfigure what counts as consciousness and who/what has a voice (Malhotra et al., 2023). This is a complex challenge for education if the aim is to rethink children’s rights as always in relation to planetary rights.

A quick recap and a quick step forward

Thinking with children’s rights and planetary rights is an opportunity for transformative change. A rights emphasis can indicate a deeply engrained disadvantage as children’s rights, for example, are generally considered a ‘special priority right’ rather than a core aspect of civic rights (Dixon and Nussbaum, 2011). In addition to the marginalization of children’s rights, due to children’s limited capability to make decisions about their own rights, there is a wider issue of human exceptionalism that informs the rights agenda. The questions that guide this article ask: is it important to continue to develop children’s rights within the human rights agenda? What are the possibilities and the difficulties if human rights, including children’s rights, are integrated into a planetary rights perspective? Can we imagine children’s agency alongside the planet as transformative change agents? How would such imaginings play out in everyday life, in local places and on a planetary scale? In the Terra Viva manifesto (2015), written as a vision for planetary citizenship as a contribution to the United Nation’s Year of the Soil, rights are framed within universal rights. However, these universal rights are planetary rights that include all life. Humans are an integral part of diversity that makes up planetary liveliness:

‘The democracy of all life is a participatory, living democracy in a vibrant and bountiful Earth – Terra Viva – it recognizes the intrinsic worth of all species and all people. Because all people and all species are, by their very nature, diverse, it recognizes diversity as not something to be tolerated, but something to be celebrated as the essential condition of our existence. And all life, including all human beings, have a natural right to share in nature’s wealth, to ensure sustenance soil, food, water, ecological space and evolutionary freedom’ (Shiva et al., 2015: 20).

The following intensities are a call for imagination for liveable futures as any future is emerging in the present moment. The intensities have been pulled together with a philosophically-minded approach to analysis as relational mapping (Duhn et al., 2021). The intention is to map some of the forces that shape current thinking around ‘rights’ and to make visible the relationalities that hold children’s rights in place.

Intensity #1: A hierarchy of ‘rights’

Children’s rights, their participation and contribution to their cultures and societies, as it intersects with the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, is very much part of the political imaginary of a post-war era that sought to strengthen civic societies in the aftermath of fascism and totalitarianism. Eleanor Roosevelt’s advocacy for inalienable rights for all humans, the premise of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, still stands out today as visionary (Swadener and Polakow, 2011). The vision of steady, peaceful, democratic progress towards a stable and predictable future that ensures prosperity in a powerful economic system has shaped social justice agendas with the promise of brighter futures (Schildermans, 2022). It is interesting to note that the Declaration of Universal Human Rights promotes the global North and its historical bias for white propertied ‘normality’, including gender and age norms. While the Declaration of Universal Human Rights was a mid-20th century milestone, it is glaringly obvious that Indigenous rights, children’s rights and women’s rights have struggled to make it to the forefront of debates over the past century. Even worse, the rights of more-than-human others, including animals, plants and entire ecologies and ecological systems have largely been ignored as non-essential to progressive capitalism based on western democratic values. It seems that there is a hierarchy of rights at play, with Universal Human Rights at the top of western industrialized nation states’ agendas, and with women’s, Indigenous and children’s rights increasingly closer to the bottom of the rights hierarchy. More-than-human rights, including planetary rights and animal rights (Nussbaum, 2023) are not even in the vicinity of the hierarchy. Like global capitalism, the hope seems to be for a trickle-down effect that eventually spreads wealth and rights from the top to those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Wealth and rights are distributed unequally (Lynch, 2020). Wealth enables unequal access to rights on a local and on a global scale (Pistor, 2019).

Wealth ensures the right to live in a place that offers security. Wealth enables the buying of passports and of land and property in countries that are the most sheltered from the fallout of climate emergencies. Wealth buys the right to have access to unpolluted food sources, to reasonably clean water and air. Wealth, both individually and for entire nations, creates a buffer that generates a sense of stability on a planet in immense stress (Pande, 2023). However, these buffers are becoming porous as recent floods, fires and tornedos demonstrate. Even the wealthy are no longer fully protected (Klein, 2015). Within wealthy countries, there are steep inequities between those who have wealth and can insist on their nation-state rights to a protected life, and those whose rights may exist in policy documents but whose real-life experiences make access to rights unlikely or impossible.

Those with less access to wealth are also the ones with few rights. Girls in Afghanistan see their human basic universal rights, such as access to education, taken away in a war-torn country in chaos (Mahendru, 2021). Girls, children, young people and minorities in Iran face death penalties if they use their rights to participation in a country that is buckling down on authoritarian patriarchal values (Khatam, 2023). Basic human rights are brutally violated in Ukraine where Russia is set on annihilation or at least utter submission of an entire nation (Osokina et al., 2023). Democratic countries in the European Union pass legislation that penalize those who dare to save drowning migrants close to shore on their perilous journeys from an exploited Africa in search of a more financially secure life (Giuffré, 2023). During the refugee crisis of 2015, unaccompanied minors, also called children, became a familiar phenomenon of European rights debates, and worryingly the narrative shifted from concern for unaccompanied ‘deserving’ refugee children in need of salvation to narratives of children who ‘fake’ their age to gain access to welfare payments in wealthy European nation states (Lems et al, 2020). Children’s rights are fragile, and very much needed to protect those who are the most vulnerable.

Intensity #2: Doing ‘rights’ in the Anthropocene

In the face of these ferocious violations of global human rights, what purpose is there in arguing for the rights of the plant and the rights for children? It is imperative that we chart a path forward towards envisioning a better world – one in which the traditional hierarchy of rights gives way to a model that acknowledges the vulnerability and interconnectedness of all life on our planet, which is currently facing unprecedented challenges. The International Bill of Human Rights, comprising the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), appears, in its current form, inadequate to address the complex conceptual and practical demands of rethinking rights in the Anthropocene (Burke, 2023)

This era calls for a re-evaluation and engaged response that is both place-based and planetary in outlook to help us imagine new ways of relating geological time scales, the cultural dynamics of wealth accumulation and the very essence of our existence as a species (Kotzé, 2019). Haraway’s (2016; Haraway et al., 2015) work emphasizes the importance of rethinking dominant narratives and imagining alternative futures. She argues that these new imaginings can help us create a more just and sustainable world. In particular, Haraway’s (2016) concept of the ‘Chthulucene’ provides a framework for imagining a world that prioritizes care for the planet and all its inhabitants. This framework emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings and the need to work together, across species and across deep divides, to create a better future. While this is approach is promising as a concept, the reality of living in poly-crisis dominated world makes it difficult to even begin to imagine who such a new rights model would work. But why should this be easy? One of the big conceptual shifts required relates to a rethinking of purpose, both on an individual and a societal scale (Kotzé, 2019). Haraway’s ideas and theories can provide a valuable perspective for imagining a better world and can help to challenge dominant narratives and promote new, more equitable and sustainable ways of thinking and acting. By engaging with her ideas and speculative approaches, we can work towards creating a better future for all.

Climate change, fossil-fuelled economies and wars and a concern for human rights are legacies of the past century. Yet there is little public discussion of these interlinkages, including a discussion of the complex relationalities between rights, climate change and fossil fuelled destruction (Thompson, 2022). Such discussion is essential to move beyond a human-centric paradigm that continues to frame the planet as a resource to be divided, owned, sold and exploited in an extraction-focused global economy. Billions of humans, animals, plants, biodiversity in general and life as a planetary force suffer in these conditions. A paradigmatic shift that not only examines current conditions critically but also generates new possibilities for creating conditions that account for complexities, for uncertainties and for participation of those that have not been heard in the past, is urgently needed. This includes children and more-than-humans. Haraway’s (2016) advice for these times is to stay with the trouble, even if this is difficult and uncomfortable as Gaia/Earth pushes in, as Isabelle Stengers (2015) argues.

The Gaia hypothesis, originally proposed by James Lovelock and co-developed with Lynn Margulis, presents Earth as a self-regulating system that maintains life-sustaining conditions on this planet. This interdisciplinary concept, combining geology, physiology, cybernetics and microbial ecology, suggests a major shift in scientific thinking. As a philosophical concept, Stengers’ Gaia embraces the idea of earth as a living entity that consists of complex ecologies, networks and relationalities. She interprets the Gaia hypothesis with emphasis on the disruption of human exceptionalism by foregrounding more-than-human agency. Stengers (2015) refers to Gaia as ‘the one who intrudes’ (43) to call humans into question in our relationship with Earth. Gaia-thinking requires ethical reconsiderations of understandings of who ‘we’ are in these co-creating dynamic relationalities with the planet.

Reimaging rights for children in the Anthropocene has to start with the rights of the planet to begin to account for the relationalities that make ecologies. Children, families, human and more than human communities are part of ecologies and ecological systems (Rose, 2021). In educational research, the shift towards a consideration of children as always entangled with an agentic world has been put forward as a response to calls for a recognition of deeply enmeshed, complex human-planet relationalities (Weldemariam and Wals, 2020). Ecologies themselves are fluid, responsive and alive. They change in unexpected ways and more often than not human interference in the change process is uninformed and damaging, leading to the labelling of ecological change agents as ‘weeds’ that need to be nuked (Kirkpatrick, 2019). An example of this is the initiative to reward young children with a cash bonus for feral cats killed to ‘protect’ native habitats (McLure, 2023). Research in Australia on the impact of feral cat populations on wildlife shows the habitat structural complexity involved which takes time, resources and high level expertise to understand before making decisions about interventions (Stobo-Wilson, 2020).

This example demonstrates that there is an urgent need for learning and for research to better understand how ecological communities work, and what this shift towards relationalities means for rights perspectives. Who has rights to decide in a more-than-human ecological community? Who has a voice, who hasn’t? What do rights mean when children, trees, insects, adults, stones and water become kin in an ecological tangle?

The past and its leakages into the present and its foreshadowing of difficult, unpredictable and potentially unliveable futures has enormous impact on today’s children and on unborn future generations. It is the past that gives form to futures, with the present moment as interlocutor, as a constant opportunity to shape what is to come. There is opportunity for education to be pragmatic by focusing on the here, now and who, in this place, without losing sight of the planet. It is in this century that early childhood research is beginning to open up towards knowledges, practices and perspectives that consider not only children but also the planet (Wolff et al., 2020). If the past left a legacy of fossil fuelled nightmares that change conditions for all life on earth, then futures to come must develop radically new ways of imagining and doing ‘rights’.

The Rights of the Child (UNCRC), as important as they still are, are not sufficient on its own when it comes to imagining liveable futures for today’s children and generations to come (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2019). Relying on children’s rights only as a policy tool creates single vision. Single vision is not useful when it comes to understanding anthropogenic pluri-crises (Davies et al., 2017). Reimagining futures requires a lens that is both holistic and fragmented to allow for diversity to come together in ever-changing patterns. One of the big challenges is to adjust to such a vision as it means forgoing stable views of a steadily progressive world where the future promises increased equality, increased wealth, increased security for all. This stability was an illusion, as climate crisis, economic crisis, biodiversity crises, food security crisis, pollution crisis, water crisis, new and old wars and a global pandemic are teaching us. A sense of stability was based on hyper-separation, extraction, exploitation of planetary life, and on vastly unequal distribution of wealth, resources and political, social and economic power (Irwin, 2010). Illusions of achieving permanence and stability without consideration of consequences have shaped nation states and democracies, including rights discourses, in particular after the upheaval of the wars of the 20th century. Children as future citizens were only part of this vision as future contributors to a stable, democratic nation state. They were not considered as future citizens with the right to live on a healthy planet.

Intensity #3: Thinking ‘rights’ in climate change education

Children are one of the populations most vulnerable to climate crises. In 2019, UNICEF’s emphasis on climate change included the integration of advocacy for children’s rights to be at the centre of climate policies and actions. This ongoing work includes the development of indices, such as the Children’s Climate Risk Index (https://unicef.org/reports/climate-crisis-child-rights-crisis) to underscore the need for data-driven, child-centred approaches to children’s rights in a climate changed world. The emphasis on child-centred approaches is also reflected in the Convention of the Rights of the Child which outlines climate change related dangers to children’s rights specifically in Articles 24 and 29 (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2019). Article 24 highlights the challenge for health and health services to effectively address dangers and risks of environmental pollution. While this is not naming climate change explicitly, the risk to children from climate change disasters include pollution. This is evident in the statistics in Australia that provide evidence of the impact of the wildfires of 2019/2020 on young children’s academic performance, their social development and their health (Williamson et al., 2022; Walter et al., 2020; Gibbs et al., 2019). Similarly, there is mounting evidence of the risks to children in the aftermath of floods where water and soil are dangerously polluted when the floods recede. Children are one of the most susceptible groups when it comes to flood-related vulnerabilities (Lee et al., 2020). Article 29 outlines the aims of education, including the very broad aim of developing children’s respect for natural environments, based on children’s rights to access to nature. Climate change is increasingly changing the way in which children access natural environments, with growing concerns for children’s health, social, emotional and physical development due to climate anxiety (Crandon et al., 2022). Climate change is clearly a children’s rights issue, and this issue is now taken to courts for the first time.

The highest court in Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court, published its ruling on climate change and human rights in March 2021. In a landmark decision (Minnerop, 2022), the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the provisions of the German Climate Change Act of 12 December 2019 (Klimaschutzgesetz) are incompatible with fundamental rights insofar as they lack sufficient requirements for further emission reductions from 2031 onwards:

‘In an order published today, the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court held that the provisions of the Federal Climate Change Act of 12 December 2019 (Bundes-Klimaschutzgesetz – KSG) governing national climate targets and the annual emission amounts allowed until 2030 are incompatible with fundamental rights insofar as they lack sufficient specifications for further emission reductions from 2031 onwards’ (Bundesverfassungsgericht, 2021, para 1).

This is in line with a general trend – climate change-related litigation is on the rise. To pick up on Isabelle Stengers’ (2015) Gaia-thinking: Gaia is pushing in, and climate change as a planetary issue is making itself visible as intricately linked with human rights in the German courts. Children in particular are considered as highly affected by climate change and their rights are at the forefront of the German Climate Change Act (Von Zabern and Tulloch, 2021).

Returning to climate change related dangers to children’s rights as outlined in the aims of education and the broad aim of developing children’s respect for natural environments in Article 29 (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2019), the question is: is teaching young children respect for natural environments even coming close to what children need to learn in times of climate crises? How to teach for floods, winds, heat, draughts, fires? What do children need to learn to live on a planet that is responding increasingly more violently and faster to human inability to curb fossil fuel dependency and CO2 outputs? These questions make clear that the CRC, adopted by the UN in 1983 as a global policy document, has a lot of scope to provide climate change guidance in relation to children’s rights. Indeed, there is a pressing need to revise and rethink children’s rights in light of 21st century pluri-crises, and particularly in relation to climate change education.

Globally, early childhood education has been slow to respond to planetary poly-crises. This includes responses to climate change (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). It is unsurprising that early childhood education as a field of research and as a profession is unsure about how to engage with changing planetary conditions because the scale of global upheaval is unprecedented. This is a conundrum but can also be a call to action, as the thoughtful work of Margaret Somerville and her colleagues demonstrate for early childhood education (Somerville and McGavock, 2022). The study focuses on a kindergarten in the Blue Mountains, Australia, after the 2019/2020 bushfires. Educators addressed children’s concerns and experiences related to the disaster by providing hands-on, empathetic opportunities for engagement. One example was the setting up of an ‘animal hospital’ for soft toys which enabled children to see themselves as healers and actors rather than as victims and bystanders of the horrors that many of them witnessed directly.

Early childhood education is well placed to respond to place-based events, such as floods and bush fires by supporting children, families and communities as they grapple with drastic change (De Bruin et al., 2020). Families with young children often encounter education systems for the first time when their children become members of an early childhood community. Early childhood education is understood as the gateway into lifelong learning, and as the foundation for a good life. It is also positioned as an important site for learning to be good citizens who care, who engage and who participate to their communities and places with a strong sense of fairness and justice (Cameron and Moss, 2020). There are opportunities here to take a close, hard look at what can be achieved right now, in this place and in this community to work towards planetary climate justice by explicitly considering children’s rights to live on a healthy planet.

A conclusion that imagines liveable futures

The following imagined micro-scenario for early childhood education is a Haraway-inspired attempt to bring liveable futures into conversation through imagination that is based on present-day realities. The imagined micro-scenario concludes the exploration of planetary rights and children’s rights by mapping the three rights’ intensities that have been discussed in this article. The intention is pragmatic: without imagining liveable futures it is difficult to see a way forward. Perhaps imagination is our strongest ally in co-creating dynamic, ever-changing human-planet relationalities with children as a response to climate crises in early childhood education. The scenario builds on some of the literature that has informed this article but there is no ‘real’ early childhood service where these events have actually taken place. It is a playful engagement with planetary relational rights in early childhood education in times of climate crises in Australia, and beyond, and the modest intention is to encourage what-if thinking.

Imagining relational rights

In a coastal town under the scorching Australian sun, a community-managed early childhood education centre has developed a changing climates approach to education. The centre works in close collaboration with the community which includes families who have recently migrated to this place as well as families who have ties to Country that reach back over millennia. The educators are practice experts who know their community, the history of this place, and they consider themselves as pedagogical leaders in their field. They have recognized that recent floods and bushfires have had a profound impact on their community and on Country. Children have experienced climate change directly and this has shaped how this service understands its educational responsibility. The educators have formed a place-based network where they meet with others who work with young children, including health professionals, a local community garden organizer, Aboriginal community members and local council members. This network sets itself practical tasks and they also imagine futures together to help each of them to better understand what their work with young children requires after recent bushfires and floods, but also in preparation for future crises. For the educators from the early childhood service, this includes a re-thinking and re-practicing of rights to account for their shift towards children’s rights as-always-in-relation to planetary rights. They decide to embark on an exploration of water as a rights issue. What follows is an imagined water exploration with children.

Curious rights practice: Exploring rivers of knowledge

On a hot day, children notice that the little creek outside the fence is drying up. This little creek turned into a torrent of water in autumn last year, and some of the children remember the sound it made, and they recall the panic of their adults when they rushed to pick them up early. Some of their homes were flooded, with dirty water rushing into bedrooms to sweep away toys. Some of the children had to move homes after the floods. The houses were too wet, too dangerous and impossible to clean up. Children lost companions when pets did not return home.

The educators began collecting stories of the floods with the children and made books with the children. Sometimes, children did not want to talk about what had happened, so some of the story books have empty pages.

In their network, educators talked about the sadness they felt when listening to children. They were unsure about what to do, what to say. Others in the network suggested to get to know the creek, to learn to listen to the creek and to Country with children as there were concerns that the children now feared the creek.

The educators listened and asked for help. Aboriginal network members offered to come and listen, to walk and talk with children. The health professionals offered support by talking about their experiences of children’s improved health and wellbeing outcomes when they feel a sense of belonging to place. As an action, the educators planned a season-based creek encounter, with the intention of getting to know the creek with the children.

In a newsletter to families, the educators describe the learning:

With the children, we learn about the delicate balance of water ecologies. We spend a lot of time listening to the babbling creek. Children sang songs with the creek. We noticed that birds would sing at certain times of the season, close to the water. We noticed that, after the rain, the creek sounded different. We realised that the creek was lively, jumpy, happy, fast and slow. We discovered tiny creatures darting through the muddy waters, and one day, we traced the creek as far as we could. We told stories of the creek, to imagine its journey from below the earth to the ocean. We listened to stories that told us of all those animals and plants that live with the creek. We begin to understand that the creek is not just water. It is a living entity, and we live and die with it. It is getting noticeable hotter as summer approaches. We noticed that the creek is becoming a neighbour to us, and we worry about the creek’s health in this heat.

One of the children said: the creek was vomiting in autumn, there was too much of it. It is starving now. The creek is sick.

As educators we can see that through play and exploration, children grasp the significance and liveliness of water and the potential impact of floods and droughts on our community. This is infused with Aboriginal teachings of water as a life-giving force, passed down through generations. The children worry about the creek’s health. A child’s right to a healthy planet includes the creek’s wellbeing. Our future plans include an exploration of how the creek looked in the past, and what happens to the water on its way as it runs through farmland. We want to find out where the wild animals drink when the creek dries up and find out if we can help. Through these place-based experiences, children nurture a profound connection to place, respecting the creek and the multi-species ecologies that sustain life and are sustained by a healthy creek. They learn to advocate for the creek and for its ecologies, including human ecologies. Children’s rights are rights for the planet.

Final words

The shift towards integrating children’s rights with planetary rights represents a paradigmatic change in how we conceptualize rights in the Anthropocene. This article illuminates the necessity of transcending traditional, anthropocentric views of rights – where children’s rights are often siloed within human rights discourse – towards a more holistic, eco-centric perspective that acknowledges the interdependence of all life forms on Earth. The concept of planetary rights, as discussed in the article, extends beyond the human-centric framework to encompass the rights of ecosystems, species and natural entities, thereby recognizing the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world. This broader perspective is crucial in an era where the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation threaten not only the well-being of current and future generations of children but also the health of the planet itself.

Integrating children’s rights with planetary rights involves acknowledging that children’s well-being is intrinsically linked to the health of their environment. It means recognizing that children have a right to inherit a planet that is capable of sustaining life in all its diversity and complexity. This relational approach to rights emphasizes the interconnectedness of social justice and environmental sustainability, highlighting the need for educational, legal and policy frameworks that empower children as agents of change within their communities and advocates for the planet. The imagined scenario in early childhood education picks up on Haraway’s (2016) call to imagine how this shift can manifest in practice. By fostering a deep connection to place and an understanding of the interconnectedness of all life, educational initiatives can cultivate a sense of responsibility and agency in young children, empowering them to become stewards of their environment and advocates for planetary well-being.

In rounding out this shift, it is essential to emphasize that reimagining children’s rights in the context of planetary rights is not merely an expansion of the scope of rights but a fundamental rethinking of our ethical obligations to both current and future generations and the planet. This approach calls for collaborative, cross-disciplinary efforts to develop new legal, educational and social frameworks that reflect the complex realities of the Anthropocene and prioritize the long-term health and resilience of our planet.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Iris Duhn

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Rethinking children’s rights in relation to planetary rights: A relational perspective in the era of climate change and other crises

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: Mapping the relationality of the ‘rights’

A quick recap and a quick step forward

Intensity #1: A hierarchy of ‘rights’

Intensity #2: Doing ‘rights’ in the Anthropocene

Intensity #3: Thinking ‘rights’ in climate change education

A conclusion that imagines liveable futures

Imagining relational rights

Curious rights practice: Exploring rivers of knowledge

Final words

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

References