Literature Review

Human pervasiveness on the Earth System, characterised by unprecedented social and environmental crises, demands a reimagining of human-Nature relations. Emerging from Earth Jurisprudence, a Rights of Nature (RoN) approach has been proposed as a legal and conceptual mechanism to interrogate exploitative human-Nature relations and facilitate an Earth-centric transition within Western systems of law and governance. While this concept has gained recent traction in Australia, RoN creation and recognition still faces significant practical and conceptual barriers. This article presents the results of an exploratory qualitative analysis articulating the perspectives of state members of parliament, local councillors, lawyers, academics, advocates, and community volunteers to provide insight and understanding into perceived obstacles to RoN creation and recognition in Australia. Twenty-five key barriers were identified and categorised into a novel taxonomy called the Barriers and Enablers to Rights of Nature (BERN) Framework, with the most salient including: (1) Dominant Paradigms, namely anthropocentrism, economic ideologies, political ideologies and partisanship, and social and political conservatism; (2) Regulatory Obstacles, including the existing regulatory system and rights structures; (3) Vested Interests; and (4) Power, including limited opportunity to participate in decision-making, access to decision-makers, and government levels. In articulating these factors, stakeholder dissonance regarding the employment, definition, and framing of RoN was observed, indicating RoN functions as a boundary object in the Australian context. We consider how identifying RoN as a boundary object may impact advocacy, as well as the implications it may have for overcoming barriers to RoN creation and recognition.

The past 10 years have witnessed a flourishing of interdisciplinary research across the social sciences that aims to better theorize the relationships between structural racism and the deepening ecological crisis. In this article, I consider how grassroots lawyers and community activists for the ‘rights of nature’ (RoN) in the United States are transforming their discourses, legal tactics, and pedagogical strategies in the face of a national context marked by pervasive anti-Black racism. After considering how racism has historically accompanied efforts to extend moral and legal ‘personhood’ to ecosystems in ways that continue to make solidarity work with racial justice organizations vexed and difficult, I show that, despite these exclusionary legacies, RoN activists are experimenting with municipal law-making in ways that are bringing them into closer conversation with contemporary racial justice struggles. Instead of focusing narrowly on the problem of the denial of ‘rights’ to non-humans, RoN activists are increasingly concerned with the broader structural problem of state pre-emption over local decision-making and the profoundly anti-democratic nature of a state/corporate nexus that is limiting possibilities for progressive action across a wide range of justice issues. Whilst these legal experiments do not resolve enduring tensions between anti-racist and environmental struggles, they suggest important re-directions taking place among historically white environmental activists.

Recognising the rights of nature is seen by many as the paradigm shift needed to truly embed ecology and the environment into nature-based policy and management solutions to address biodiversity loss, climate change, and sustainable development. However, despite its potential, research across and beyond disciplinary boundaries remains very limited, with most located in the humanities and social sciences and often lacking connection with environmental sciences. Based on a multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary project, we identify some critical common themes among the humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences to support future research on the potential of the rights of nature to address contemporary social-environmental challenges. We argue that future research needs to be not only interdisciplinary but also transdisciplinary since the movement of rights of nature is often driven by and based on knowledge emerging outside of academic disciplines.

In the last 15 years, “rights of nature” as a concept and legal apparatus has spread across various sites and scales of environmental governance throughout the world. This paper examines the rights of nature phenomenon, focusing on a recent decision by the High Court of Uttarakhand, India to grant legal personhood to the Ganga (Ganges) and Yamuna rivers and associated natural entities. Arguing against “diffusionist” and “global” approaches to understanding the rights of nature phenomenon, and drawing on the concept of translocal assemblages, I emphasise the place-based specificities of these decisions in addition to their translocal connections. Through a close reading of the Uttarakhand case, I demonstrate the need to situate translocal social movements in place by attending to the manner in which “rights of nature” becomes articulated through specific practices, cultural meanings, material networks, human–environment relations, legal regimes, governance structures, and political projects in culturally and geographically specific ways with often counterintuitive outcomes. Rather than seeing “rights of nature” as a global movement or network manifesting at various scales, I consider it as a boundary object connecting translocal assemblages of environmental governance through acts of translation. In doing so, I push assemblage geographies to engage theoretical problems of difference, boundaries, and translation that have yet to be addressed in this emerging paradigm.

A growing number of jurisdictions have recently granted rights to nature. This article places the potential disruptions generated by this legal development in historical, comparative perspective. The questions that scholars are asking about rights of nature (RoN) are similar to many of those asked by historians and legal scholars about human rightsholders. These questions arise from some of the tensions within liberalism. Placing these tensions in comparative context offers a framework with which to interpret RoN developments. Doing so demonstrates, first, the capacity of the existing liberal order to incorporate challenges into already functioning structures and, second, that such efforts to manage the claims of new subjects of rights nonetheless can transform relations. In our conclusion, we argue that a comparative perspective may allay the tendency to exoticise rights of nature by examining the extent to which their development in sometime contentious and sometimes complementary relationship with democratic institutions is reflected in historical efforts to define and make meaningful the rights of human rightsholders.

The Anthropocene thesis contends that the earth has entered a new geological epoch, dominated by human action. This article examines the Anthropocene in relation to law and aesthetics, arguing that the concepts of law and the stories of law’s origins that we mobilise in this context play a significant role in rendering us sensitive or insensitive to the multifarious challenges that the Anthropocene poses to social life. In arguing against aspects of Earth Jurisprudence scholarship, which has developed a novel understanding of the ‘rights of nature’, this article argues that it is through an attention to obligations, rather than rights, that a sensitivity to the forces and relations that define the Anthropocene might be fostered. The shift from rights to obligations entails a commensurate movement from aesthetics – where questions of form, integrity and harmony predominate – to aesthesis, the study of the somatic, sensory and affective dimensions of human experience. The article concludes by arguing that it is within the contemporary city, understood as a discrete form of human and infrastructural association, that an aesthesis of obligations in the context of the Anthropocene can be most acutely perceived.

The Rights of Nature (RoN) promote a new understanding of the human environment, where natural entities are conceived as subjects with intrinsic value independent of human interests. The implementation of this idea gained momentum in the United States in 2006. One decade and a half later, the idea has spread all over the world. Despite some efforts, a sophisticated geographical inventory of the movement is missing. Building on Kauffman (2020), we identified and analysed 409 initiatives in 39 countries, creating the most comprehensive database of RoN initiatives to date. We developed a taxonomy that may guide further research. We also present two detailed maps which can help policymakers, legislators, judges, researchers, and the public at large to evaluate and compare initiatives. The findings of this investigation directly help the UN Harmony with Nature Programme and have contributed to the launch of the Eco-Jurisprudence Monitor, an online database of RoN initiatives.

Ecuador’s recently adopted conflict resolution techniques have aggravated the always tense encounters between Amazonian indigenous communities, oil companies and the state. The state’s governmentality project portrays these socio-environmental conflicts as mere technical–managerial issues while societal coalitions re-politicize them through territorial defense struggles. The Cofán Dureno case highlights how the self-proclaimed ‘Citizen’s Revolution’ government seeks to redefine socio-natural relationships and territorial identities, devising ‘communities of convenience’. These correspond to the state’s own images, political structure and ideology, promoting ‘community participation’ to facilitate oil extraction. Ecuador’s constitutionally recognized Rights of Nature (paradoxically installed by the same government) are analyzed with a focus on their potential for resisting socio-environmental injustice. The internationally celebrated inclusion of these rights in the Constitution was advocated by nonindigenous intellectual activists but influenced and supported by the indigenous movement. Beyond legal implications, these rights might foster an epistemic pact between indigenous and nonindigenous society to defend territories from extractive industries.

The recognition of nature's rights takes various froms, including constitutional provisions, national laws, municipal ordinances, and court decisions. Nature's legal rights go far beyond standing to sue because they encompass the right to exist, flourish, and be restored. A fundamental question is: Do these remarkable legal developments have practical consequences, or are they merely paper tigers?

A good deal of the concern over environmental protection stems from the feeling that something known as Nature has rights or needs, and that industrial society is careless of these. What is it people have in mind when they say this? How can Nature, which is not in any obvious sense a moral agent or a unified, sentient thing, have any rights? What would our social planning be like if we set about to take care of the rights of Nature in some systematic way? And, to go one step farther back, is a secular, homocentric approach to morals and values capable of articulating or defending the principles on which a theory of the rights of Nature depends? What follows is a first effort on my part to sort out my thoughts on these matters. Happily, one starts with the help of a considerable deposit of thought in the western tradition.

The recognition of the rights of nature is currently being debated in the juridical, sociological, and ethical fields. In Ecuador and Bolivia the recognition of the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth) began in the context of constitutional and legal amendments more than a decade ago. This process was articulated with proposals presented as alternatives to global capitalism related to the indigenous worldviews known as buen vivir or vivir bien. An exploration of these processes identifies a number of challenges to socio-legal research and points to the increasing acknowledgment of the rights of nature in various countries in Latin America and other parts of the world.

Designating rights for nature is a potentially powerful way to open up the dialogue on nature conservation around the world and provide enforcement power for an ecocentric approach. Experiments using a rights-based framework have combined in-country perspectives, worldviews, and practices with legal justifications giving rights to nature. This paper looks at a fusion of legal traditions, religious worldviews, and practices of environmental protection and advocacy in the context of India. It takes two specific legal cases in India and examines the recent high-profile rulings designating the rivers Ganga, Yamuna, and their tributaries and glaciers as juristic persons. Although the rulings were stayed a few months after their issuance, they are an interesting bending of the boundaries of nature, person, and deity that produce Ganga and Yamuna as vulnerable prototypes. This paper uses interview data focusing on these cases and document and archival data to ask whether legal interventions giving rights to nature can become effective avenues for environmental activism and spiritual ecology. The paper also assesses whether these legal cases have promoted Hindu nationalism or ‘Hindutva lite’.