Care as Legal Knowledge

‘Gravity of Tenderness’ by The Fabler.

The world of international legal negotiations is often seen as one of neutrality and technocracy – the art of bracketing, footnoting and carefully negotiating ambiguity. But beneath the formal processes and consensus language that we see in treaty texts, lies the rather chaotic and human experience of negotiations – where mothers’ voices have consistently and powerfully brought to the forefront governments’ responsibility across generations, forcing the international community of states to see and hear, through the lens of motherhood’s memory, care, and demands for justice, the often brutal impacts of sovereign acts and omissions.

Mothers have long shaped international law, even when the law has refused to recognize them as authoritative stakeholders. They have done so both as insiders – scientists, diplomats, negotiators, advocates – and as outsiders whose lived experience forced open gates that institutions preferred to keep closed. This is most evident in the evolution of international environmental law: from Gro Harlem Brundtland’s seminal leadership at the World Commission on the Environment and Development – which anchored the (now fundamental legal) principle of sustainable development in international law – to the work of the late Indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Her assassination incited widespread scrutiny on the conditions of human rights defenders in Honduras and profoundly influenced international efforts linking environmental protection and human rights, including the landmark 2019 UN resolution on the protection of environmental human rights defenders.

Recognizing the role of mothers in this context is not to romanticize care or essentialize women, it is an acknowledgement that caregiving – for children, communities, and ecosystems – produces knowledge that international law has historically dismissed as emotional, anecdotal, or unscientific. And yet, this knowledge has repeatedly proven foundational to the expanding scope and ambition of international law. Although caregiving is commonly understood as an invisible and unpaid form of labour rooted in the private sphere, it also extends into the highly public domain of international environmental negotiations.

Defenders on the Ground: International Law Beyond the Negotiating Table

Mothers shape international law not only in formal institutional spaces, but on the land itself. In Canada and globally, Indigenous mothers have been at the forefront of resistance to extractive projects that threaten water, ancestral lands, and the health of future generations. Wet’suwet’en women leaders, for instance, have acted as land defenders, caregivers, and legal actors, asserting Indigenous law in the face of state and corporate power. Indigenous mothers defending land and water uphold legal orders that predate and challenge colonial legal systems, and while they are frequently criminalized and surveilled, their resistance monitors and continuously shapes states’ evolving interpretation of consent, self-determination, sovereignty, and environmental protection.

International law has long privileged certain forms of knowledge: quantitative data, economic modeling, and corporate risk assessments. Care-based knowledge, for example, how pollution affects pregnancy, how toxins accumulate in children, how environmental degradation fractures community life, has been treated as supplementary. And yet, it is precisely this knowledge that reveals the failures of existing legal frameworks.

From the Arctic to Geneva: Mothers as Knowledge Holders

The global regime governing toxic chemicals and wastes did not emerge solely from government-appointed expert committees; it was propelled by the observations of Inuit mothers in the Arctic. Long before persistent organic pollutants (POPs) became a defined category in international law, Inuit women observed rising illness in their children, contamination in breast milk, and changes in animals that sustained their communities. Mothers were on the frontlines of toxins moving through food systems, into bodies, and across generations. Their observations disrupted the convenient fiction that pollution was local and containable. Inuit mothers helped advance global scientific understanding of how chemicals do not respect borders, and neither do their harms. The lived experiences of Inuit mothers thus became a catalyst for the global regulation of POPs, informing negotiations that culminated in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) at the time, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, brought motherhood and children’s health to the forefront of the first session of talks, reminding over one hundred negotiating countries that “[A] poisoned Inuk child, a poisoned Arctic, and a poisoned planet are all one and the same.”

Arctic Indigenous women’s knowledge has been pivotal to strengthening global scientific understanding of mercury contamination as well, and to the adoption of the Minamata Convention aiming to protect human and environmental health from mercury pollution, ratified by 153 countries to date.

In this sense, the history behind both the Stockholm and Minamata Conventions shows that mothers’ knowledge did not merely contribute stories after the fact; their knowledge and extensive scientific collaborations with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) and the Arctic Council have propelled and reshaped the very architecture of international environmental governance. As noted by the Arctic Council and the Government of Canada,  Arctic Indigenous concerns were integral to building political will for the treaties and to guiding their regulatory logic. In this way, Inuit mothers functioned simultaneously as outsiders excluded from formal decision-making spaces and as epistemic authorities whose insights forced those spaces to evolve in their approaches to global environmental governance and justice.

The same dynamic is playing out today in negotiations toward a global plastics treaty. Plastics negotiations are often dominated by technical debates: polymer definitions, waste hierarchies, trade rules, chemical restrictions, and recycling targets. These conversations are detached from the realities of plastic pollution as it is actually lived. Throughout the plastics treaty talks, Indigenous mothers from frontline communities, in both the Arctic and non-Arctic, have demanded to be included as active participants in the treaty negotiations, calling for governments to bring an end to the extensive, invasive and disproportionate harms of petrochemical and plastic production on their families and communities.

Similar to the world of international environmental law, decisions from regional human rights tribunals (such as The Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku vs. Ecuador) and the outcomes of other legal, as well as broader, “antiviolent success strategies” led by women environmental defenders show that through their testimonies and activism at multiple scales, mothers force law-makers to confront the gap between formal commitments and lived consequences. They challenge the idea that incrementalism is acceptable when children’s health is at risk, and they expose the failure of regulatory approaches that prioritize corporate convenience over human health. In this way, mothers occupy a dual role as both witnesses and architects, grounding legal frameworks in reality while pushing them towards greater ambition.

Reclaiming International Law for the Next Generation

If mothers have progressively shaped international law through care and responsibility, then the growing infiltration of corporate power into law-making at all scales represents a profound affront to their role as normative actors. Corporate actors increasingly dominate environmental negotiations, as we see by the continuously bloating presence of fossil fuel industry representatives at climate COPs and even the plastics treaty negotiations. They frame pollution as a management problem rather than a human rights and health justice issue. They prioritize market access and voluntary commitments over binding obligations and robust public accountability mechanisms. In doing so, they advance interests fundamentally opposed to caregiving.

For mothers, pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and the industrial production of plastics and chemicals, increasingly represents an existential threat. In contrast, the corporate capture of international law normalizes exposure, delays action and externalizes harm onto children and future generations. It asks caregivers to accept risk so that profits can continue uninterrupted. It treats children’s health as negotiable, not a fundamental right.

Mothers have always been part of international law’s making as observers, disruptors, and visionaries. But for the world of international law to fully acknowledge them requires resisting corporate capture, valuing lived experience as legal knowledge, and centering intergenerational responsibility as a core legal principle. It means recognizing that care is a foundation of law. The core principles that have structured international law – state sovereignty, national interest, economic growth and territorial control – have manufactured a world of competing interests. To make care foundational, however, this paradigm must shift. Law would need to recognize relationality and embed responsibility across generations as its core organizing principle, structuring social, economic and environmental domains. This reorientation would transform the purpose of international law from merely managing competing interests to actively sustaining the conditions necessary for planetary health, upon which our collective future d