“Environmental defenders” : the power / disempowerment of a loaded term

Over the past two decades, the terms “environmental defenders”, “land defenders”, and “environmental human rights defenders” have gained currency among NGOs, media, and UN agencies. This has coincided with the development of an international infrastructure encompassing prizes, resolutions, and resources to support and acknowledge defenders and their causes. However, the uptake of the term “environmental defenders” and related notions has been uneven across geographical areas, languages, and those considered defenders. Listening to the voices of this last group themselves, this chapter considers two questions. First, it explores the connotations of the term “environmental defenders” and examines to what extent it corresponds to the ways those labelled in this way see and identify themselves and their work. Second, it looks at the ways in which the term empowers or, by contrast, disempowers, and the various advantages and drawbacks related to its use. We conclude by considering a number of ways in which those supporting or reporting on defenders can mitigate the inadvertent negative effects of the term, to which so far no alternative has emerged that is less contentious or better captures the heterogeneous groups that it designates.