Abstract :
[en] The world is home to approximately 1.2 billion peasants who, together with their families, represent nearly onethird of humanity. They play a vital role in ensuring food sovereignty and realizing the right to food. Their contribution is equally critical in combating climate change and preserving biodiversity. However, peasants and other rural workers remain among the most vulnerable and discriminated groups. Victims of multiple human rights violations, they disproportionately suffer from hunger and poverty. In response, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) in 2018. While the contents and origins of the Declaration have been the subject of several analyses, its potential to initiate a new form of human rights governance remains largely unexplored. This article offers a novel reading of UNDROP as an experimentalist governance instrument, revealing its potential for adaptability and normative effectiveness. It aims to address this research gap by analyzing the adoption and implementation of the Declaration through the lens of the experimentalist approach to human rights, structured around five key criteria: (1) stakeholder participation and problem framing; (2) joint articulation of objectives; (3) contextualized implementation; (4) ongoing feedback from local actors; and (5) regular revision and reevaluation. The article also discusses the advantages of such an approach, particularly its capacity to foster iterative revision and context-sensitive implementation, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of adaptive governance frameworks. Drawing on documentary analysis, including UN reports and civil society publications – and semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in the negotiation process, this research examines the participatory and iterative processes underpinning both the adoption and the early implementation of the Declaration. Applying the experimentalist lens to UNDROP enables a better understanding of the governance model it embodies by identifying mechanisms of norm co-construction and highlighting its non-linear, participatory, and evolving character. The findings confirm the Declaration's experimentalist nature, portraying it as a flexible and dynamic norm grounded in local social movement practices and collective learning. UNDROP thus demonstrates adaptive implementation potential, suggesting greater effectiveness in addressing the challenges it seeks to remedy while also facilitating interactions with other global governance regimes. The conclusions underline the relevance of experimentalist approaches in strengthening the effectiveness and legitimacy of the normative framework for the protection and promotion of peasants' rights. They show that flexible, locally adapted policies better respond to rural populations' complex challenges. UNDROP thereby exemplifies a dynamic circulation of norms: locally rooted claims led to the articulation of an international norm, which now has the potential to be recontextualized and re-appropriated at the local level through adaptive and reciprocal implementation practices.
