Stories of Systemic Failure?

Landscaping the Rights of Nature in Europe

in Journal of Legal Anthropology
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Martha-Cecilia Dietrich Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands m.c.dietrich@uva.nl

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Laura Affolter Researcher, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Germany laura.affolter@his-online.de

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Andreas Gutmann Researcher, Kassel University, Germany andreas.gutmann@uni-kassel.de.

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Jenny García Ruales Associate Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany jenny.garcia_ruales@uni-erfurt.de

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Abstract

In Europe, calls for ecosystems to be granted rights are mounting. While socio-legal research on the Rights of Nature tends to focus on the strategies of the few success stories, less attention is given to the many failed or stagnated initiatives, many of them in Europe. “Landscaping the Rights of Nature” is both a methodological proposition and an analytical approach to examining procedures available to citizens to introduce the Rights of Nature to the courts of Europe. This article examines three sociopolitical territories from our fieldwork sites in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany in which procedures characteristic of Europe's democratic systems are used to mobilise national legal governance, international networks of lobbying groups, and citizens through artistic interventions. By engaging ethnographically with the wider sociopolitical processes involved in establishing rights for nature, we seek to offer a qualitative view on the possibilities and limitations of Europe's liberal democracies in effecting sociopolitical transformations.

If we are to believe climate scientists from around the world, humanity is at a crossroads. The climate change narrative has toppled imaginings of Nature (with a capital N) as a limitless and unaffected resource provider and replaced it with the understanding of a planet finite in its offerings and fragile in its constitution. Paradigms on how to act in the world are shifting, while calls to reevaluate how earthly societies relate to their environments are getting louder and more forceful. One of the many responses to the status quo of this unfolding crisis is the proliferation of climate-related human and environmental rights that have clustered and expanded the conceptual and empirical field of climate litigation1 (Rodríguez-Garavito 2022; Auz 2022; Tigre 2022). In this context, the Rights of Nature (hereafter RoN) occupy a peculiar position since they involve neither human nor environmental law but afford similar-to-human rights to nonhuman, living entities, creating another category of personhood with a whole array of implications. Activists, lawyers, and politicians discussing these implications at conferences or public roundtables are often at odds about navigating the tensions between RoN's legal propositions and their application in specific sociopolitical contexts.2 Do we need to change politics to change the law to change people's minds, or do we need to change people's minds to change the law to change politics? This question of whether law should represent mindsets or contribute to their transformation was pertinent as we ethnographically explored the various spaces in which people leveraged RoN's conceptual possibilities for the purpose of socioecological change.

And while much of the recent literature on RoN covers the fundamental question, ‘What should law be for?’ (Tănăsescu 2022; Rodríguez-Garavito 2022; and others), the question of why RoN are ‘not delivering’, as one of our research partners put it, has been less discussed.3 In fact, many of the sociolegal studies on RoN tend to focus exclusively on the few success stories from around the world, with little attention paid to the failed or stagnated initiatives, many of them from Europe. This is no surprise, since much of the research in this field departs from an activist sensibility that wants to see RoN succeed. We, the authors, identify with many of the ambitions that have motivated research in this field. However, by widening the scope of case studies to include unsuccessful initiatives, we may offer further insights into the specific circumstances and conditions that dis/enable the introduction of RoN to the courts in Europe. More broadly, we ask not if but how certain mechanisms and procedures enable collective emancipatory action in contemporary Europe.

To determine what we call a RoN ‘landscape’, we traced the trajectories of a series of European initiatives, departing from several publicly accessible maps that list RoN law and policy initiatives from around the world.4 To this end, we conducted preliminary research on the web and phoned the organisers, many of them lawyers, politicians, and environmental activists, to find out what happened to their initiatives. We asked them to talk informally about their journeys, support base, challenges, and outcomes. From these initial maps, a multidimensional, interdisciplinary, and transnational landscape emerged—a landscape that showed RoN not as a theory or concept but as an emerging practice between people, institutions, and environments. We also found that looking at law and policy initiatives alone would not be representative of the sociopolitical spaces in which we found the RoN to operate. Advocates kept emphasising how changes in the legal landscape required political action and social work. Hence, by expanding our field of vision, we found that, in fact, law and policy initiatives were only one of three sociopolitical territories in which advocates and interest groups mobilised. Next to national and municipal law and policy initiatives, we found transnational networks pushing national agendas as well as artistic initiatives exploring the applicability of nonhuman citizenship in everyday (public) life.

Hence, in a second phase, we sought to ethnographically explore the diversity we found on local (or site-specific), trans/international, and artistic levels. We followed a Swiss parliamentary initiative, lobbied for by a transnational network of RoN advocates that sought to include RoN into the Swiss constitution (Laura Affolter); a municipal law initiative led by local politicians and engaged citizens for the recognition of the Dutch Wadden Sea as a rights holder with the purpose of protecting the area from green energy infrastructure and global extractivism (Martha-Cecilia Dietrich); and the Berlin based art project ‘Organisms Democracy’5 that playfully simulates a legal system in which natural entities have a right to political representation, thus inviting people to observe and experiment with ‘speaking for nature’ (Andreas Gutmann and Jenny García Ruales).

We made this choice not only to suggest the diversity of the RoN landscape in Europe, but also to give qualitative depth to the various epistemic fields that we have found to matter when people seek more-than-legal transformations of more-than-human political ecologies. While our research was mainly conducted through interviews and focus groups, the third case study also involved participatory observation, with the researchers assuming the roles of members of a parliament of organisms, advocating on behalf of rapeseed (Brassica napus), in order to approach the project through experience and involvement. All our case studies required juggling multiple kinds of knowledge to define what we see as a (patchy) landscape. We brought our three case studies together by identifying issues that seemingly rendered RoN impossible. In writing up our findings, we came to realise the necessity of finding a language that is evocative and open to this social ecology that is multiple, messy, and in process. Hence, we begin by establishing not what the RoN concept is, but how we have seen it put to work.

The Rights of Nature Concept: Evolving and Multiple

Just as it is a flawed endeavour to define RoN as a coherent movement or narrative, we see the RoN concept not as fixed but as multiple and evolving. This evolving multiplicity should not be misunderstood as fragmentation but rather as the ways the concept is made to cohere through a range of tactics (Mol 2002) in parliaments, courtrooms, newsrooms, lecture halls, forests, parks, and homes. ‘Being made to cohere’ also supposes a wide range of histories, agencies, and agendas. Here, we seek to trace some of the discourses and narratives that create the RoN concept and its various significations.

Advocates of RoN argue that environmental legislation in most countries has ‘failed to keep humanity from crossing critical planetary boundaries’, making new legal approaches necessary (Kotzé and Rakhyun 2019: 4). At their core, RoN propose to extend legal personality to nature in constitutions, national statutes, and local laws to be advocated for by designated bodies or an engaged citizenry. Once RoN have been enshrined in a judicial body, policies, guidelines, and resolutions can be developed (Tănăsescu 2022: 22). Scholarship on RoN has dedicated much of its work to the analysis of legal propositions (Fischer-Lescano 2020; Gutmann 2021a), representational politics (Silva Santiesteban 2021, Acosta 2021), practices of implementation, and their social impact (Affolter 2020; Viaene 2022), with most case studies having been conducted outside Europe. We join others in assuming that the number of empirical studies from Europe is limited, given the lack of successful cases (Darpö 2021; Burgers and Outer 2021). Spain's Mar Menor is the only precedent on the continent for a natural entity to be granted legal personhood, but even here, not one court case has been filed on the basis of its instituted rights (Vicente Giménez and Salazar Ortuño 2024).6

RoN law initiatives in Europe mostly extend from local, site-specific campaigns, for instance, on behalf of a particular forest, a stretch of river, a lake, or a meadow.7 There are RoN cases that are concerned with vast ecosystems like oceans, rivers, whole species populations, or territories, which extend across communities, landscapes, or countries involving multiple authorities and jurisdictions.8 Other initiatives extend from specific interest groups, like lawyers9 or NGOs,10 combining efforts to formulate petitions on the grounds of RoN to be discussed at the political level. And even though the number of initiatives is rising, their status or outcome is sobering. Of the fourteen European law initiatives we reviewed, with the earliest dating to 1988,11 only three were successful in terms of reaching a verdict. Only one natural entity finally obtained legal status. Four cases were denied, and seven stagnated or were held up at the petition stage of gathering the signatures and political support required for a parliamentary discussion. Petitioners take issue with the administrative hurdles of the democratic processes in Europe that make the mere request for a political conversation immensely laborious and time consuming.12 With reference to Burgers and Outer, who optimistically stated in their review of worldwide RoN cases that ‘with the rising amount of initiatives in law and policy, we will see that fewer people will be surprised the next time they hear that a tree has rights’ (Burgers and Outer 2021: 61), we dare to bet that the next tree granted with rights will not be standing in Europe.

In their contemporary form, RoN have many origin stories, mainly due to the multiple appropriations and contexts through which they have been mobilised. Critics often refer to RoN as a conceptual import because they are associated with Indigenous, non-Western philosophies and are therefore not representative of ‘native’ Europe. However, more-than-human advocacy, for instance, in the form of animal rights, has been documented in Europe as early as 1894 (Bregenzer 1894: 328 f.; Dinzelbacher 2002). Court appearances of living beings, particularly animals, date back to mediaeval times, albeit often to the detriment of the animal. Tierstrafen (animal punishment) for animals that had harmed or killed a person or Tierbannung (animal banning) for animal flocks that had devastated fields and crops were not uncommon (Dinzelbacher 2002). In 1478, the Christmas beetle (Anoplognathus pallidicollis) was summoned to stand trial in a French court on the charge of having been sent by witches, ‘creeping secretly in the earth’ to destroy, with intent, the laity's crops.13 Even though most animals came out of these courthouses dead or banned, the concept of nonhuman living beings as legal subjects has a history in European courts.

From another angle, an analysis of RoN could also begin with inquiring about the extent to which laws and judicial systems, in general, are themselves a product of Western organisation and thought (Huanacuni Mamani 2015, cited in Tănăsescu 2020: 10). How have Western notions of law and justice shaped the relationship between people and their environment around the world? The Wiradjuri Nyemba lawyer and legal scholar Virginia Marshall (2019) argues that RoN, as advocated for in Australia, merely replace one Western framework with another non-Indigenous one, with the effect of undermining the First Nations’ customary rights and their propositions for environmental legal personhood. She frames RoN as a compromise that, despite enabling more advocacy work, also removes political and legal agency from those who have historically been the ones in close connection with nature, affording more power to experts and scientists with no or little connection to the land.

The fields in which RoN operate are permeated by postcolonial relations (Gutmann 2021b). The tensions between celebrating RoN for incorporating subaltern perspectives into the law and problematic forms of appropriation or straitjacketing Indigenous forms of law necessarily remain and are suggestive of a wider web of social relations (García Ruales 2024: 18). However, scholarship that points to colonial legacies and systemic failures in contemporary societal organisation are often disregarded by an activist sense of urgency, as in, ‘We have to act now’. Hence, we need to work with the systems we have and not the ones that could be. It is a valid critique that by focusing solely on accommodating cases within established systems rather than examining the systems themselves, advocates may end up remedying symptoms rather than tackling their root causes.

Put into practice, the Rights of Nature affect rights over nature with a series of colliding understandings of ownership, responsibility, and care. Within Western discourses, RoN take particular issue with treating nature as objects of human property. Since the 1970s, the argument has been that nature and its parts need legal protection mechanisms before and after damage is incurred, and these mechanisms need to be enactable independently from their impact on humans. To this day, plaintiffs worldwide can mobilise environmental laws only if some form of damage has been incurred on humans or other legal entities represented by humans. Advocates face severe challenges if ‘only’ nature is affected. Aiming to reconceptualise nature as entities and systems of intrinsic value, that is, as contributors to a more-than-human common good, US legal scholar Christopher D. Stone (1972) argued in his landmark article Should Trees Have Standing? that without legal standing, claiming accountability and protection was impossible since there was nothing—no kind of subjectivity—to claim from. Stone proposed elevating nature and its parts to subjects with value inherent in their being, assuming that with legal standing, moral standing would follow. The issue, according to Stone and many of his generation, has been of a political rather than a legal nature, since the legal structures with trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, partnerships, or nation-states already set the precedents for nonhuman legal personhood decades ago. Rights of Nature advocates from the 1970s and 1980s had to wait more than twenty years for their legal propositions to be implemented in pockets around the world, with initiatives from the Global South playing a leading role.

Today, laws and policies concerning RoN have either been adopted or are in the process of being developed in at least thirty-nine countries at both municipal and national levels (Putzer et al., 2022). Advocates from around the world collaborate, make reference to, and take inspiration from case law and legislative advances elsewhere, with the effect of creating a RoN community that is globally connected. Each of us has seen this in our fieldwork in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, with references being made to Ecuador's constitutional reform (2008), the Earth laws in Bolivia (2010), and the special rights granted to the Atrato river in Colombia (2017) or the Whanganui river in Aotearoa New Zealand (2017), which were analysed and circulated via virtual platforms with global reach. International reports commissioned by the UN or other international organisations, such as the Rights of Rivers report—a ‘global survey of the rapidly developing Rights of Nature jurisprudence pertaining to rivers’ (International Rivers 2020)—see their purpose in pooling data on case studies and making their approaches accessible. Transnational networks and global NGOs like the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund (CELDF), the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) reinforce this global mobility of ideas. These platforms, too, play a crucial role in bringing new epistemological resignifications of nature and practices of advocating for natural entities to the political and legal arena (Weidman 2014; Lawy 2017; Revill 2021).

Landscaping the Rights of Nature in Europe

Partly due to the transnational connectedness described above, activists and dedicated organisations have referred to the law initiatives from around the world as a movement infusing strength and strategy into what many want to see as a consolidated global project. In contrast, political ecologist Mihnea Tănăsescu wrote that RoN are not a movement akin to a wave engulfing new terrain, but rather a trend (Tănăsescu 2022: 16). The picture we began painting during the first phase of our landscaping exercise suggested that RoN enfold their force locally, at various administrative levels of the state, with translocal connections adding force to what is already there—not like a movement (or wave) but like a rhizome. Rhizomes are found as perennating organs in many plants, for example, in mint (Mentha spicata), rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum), or ginger (Zingiber officinale). They grow nonhierarchically, underneath the ground, and have various exit points. If conditions are right, rhizomes spread towards available spaces through fissures and gaps. They work with or around other plants, but they also can erode what is in their way. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘rhizome’ to counter the use of dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome, so they argued, has not one history or culture. It forms part of a landscape with a wide array of influences and determining factors of no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (ibid.: 25), thus resisting chronology and organisation.

However, we found that most of the legislative provisions at the local and national level had, in fact, failed or stagnated in the process. Using the rhizome as an analogy to think about how RoN connect with and occupy landscapes, the two-dimensional map of Europe turned into a multidimensional landscape. Regarding a landscape as a form of ecology also means looking more closely at how agents in this landscape relate to each other. So, rather than considering the law initiatives in isolation, we paid attention to the relationships between the rhizome and its ecologies, its life-enabling environments, and exit points. ‘Noticing landscapes’, according to Anna Tsing and coauthors (2019: 188), means identifying historical assemblages of human and other-than-human life that form structures in landscapes. But rather than understanding structures like institutions or paradigms as systems of power and organisation, we take the authors’ suggestion to understand them as ‘forms coming into being’ (ibid: 187) and to develop increased awareness and sensitivity for the processes in which these landscapes emerge.

European RoN initiatives typically have two explicit concerns: either to protect a part of nature that is considered precious and in danger of being exposed to exploitation and pollution or to claim accountability for a part of nature that has already been spoilt and requires recovery. However, in each of our examples, we quickly found conceptual limitations with pressing questions seeking to be answered, such as ‘which part of nature requires (exceptional) protection?’ or ‘how can rights be implemented as foundational mechanisms of protection?’ Thus, while Eben Kirksey and Sophie Chao (2022: 7–8) remind us to assess the expectations towards RoN by stating that ‘it is important to remember that not all people are treated as fully human before the law’, it is also crucial to take a step back and consider what actually counts as ‘nature’, for whom, and at what cost. In each of our case studies, we found different strategies and propositions to answer these questions.

Governance as Usual: Law and Parliamentary Politics Meet the Rights of Nature in Switzerland

The RoN landscape in Switzerland is fragmented and disjointed. Different actors who engage in RoN struggles at national, binational, and international levels are only loosely connected, but their paths cross. For instance, every year in December, the UN hosts the Geneva Forum, a conference organised by the NGO Objectif Sciences International, bringing together RoN advocates with NGOs, government representatives, and UN agencies.14 Elsewhere in Switzerland, in the picturesque mountain village of Pontresina, the new World Ethic Forum, which took place for the first time in August 2022, found a home. This forum, too, is supposed to become a biannual event that ‘explores, searches, tests, and senses its way forward towards a common and ethical ground that serves all forms of life’. Furthermore, there is the so-called Appel du Rhône with which engaged citizens seek legal personality for the river Rhône15 by setting up a new ‘governance system for the Rhône and its tributaries’.16 Meanwhile, there are efforts underway to amend the constitution of the canton of Lucerne (and possibly also of the cantons Uri, Zug, Zurich, and Aargau) in order to recognise the legal personality of the river Reuss and grant it basic rights.17 Our main focus here, however, is on parliamentary politics and attempts to incorporate RoN in the Swiss constitution on a national level.

Five parliamentary initiatives, put forward by members of the Swiss Nationalrat (National Council, the lower house of the Swiss parliament) in 2021, requested that ‘the right of humans to a healthy environment should be enshrined as a fundamental right’ and that ‘nature should be given at least partial status as a legal subject’.18 The particularity of this case was that members of five parties from across the political spectrum had agreed to propose five identically worded parliamentary initiatives (which we will refer to in the singular) on questions of ecological safety and protection, a topic that in Europe is known to cause polarisation.

The initiative was presented as a fix to existing legislation deemed ‘insufficient to respond to the ecological crisis’ (parliamentarian Marionna Schlatter, personal conversation in August 2022). Two shifts were regarded necessary to ensure environmental protection beyond the constraints of existing laws: first, that human affectedness should no longer be the decisive factor in determining whether ‘nature’ needed protection; and second, that the term ‘nature’ needed an overhaul towards a more differentiated conceptualisation. ‘We need to get away from the dominance of humans over nature’, Schlatter insisted. ‘[T]he purpose of nature is not … to provide resources for people, but that it has the right to regenerate itself. And that it has the right to exist per se’ (personal conversation in August 2022). Granting ‘nature’ subjective rights was considered a way to implement this conceptual shift.

With this parliamentary initiative, debates took place, but they were brief (see Figures 1a and 1b). According to standard procedure, the initiative was first debated by the Legal Affairs Committee of the National Council, which subsequently recommended that the National Council reject the initiative. In the plenary session of the National Council, the initiative was then debated for exactly fifteen minutes.19 A vote was held among 189 members of parliament, with a majority of 101 voting to dismiss the initiative. Votes followed political party lines.20

Figures 1a, 1b.
Figures 1a, 1b.
Figures 1a, 1b.

Parliamentary discussion in Bern. Screenshots of recordings on Simplex TV, public domain, 2022.

Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 8, 1; 10.3167/jla.2024.080103

The debate in the Legal Affairs Committee started with the question of the initiative's feasibility. A representative of the Legislative Projects Unit of the Swiss Federal Office of Justice provided a first assessment, stating that introducing a new similar-to-human right to a healthy environment would not create any major legal problems, which meant that accepting this constitutional change was entirely up to the political will of parliament. The second part of the initiative, concerned with granting nature legal personality, was evaluated as being more difficult, since it would entail a more substantial change in Swiss law. The representative proposed an alternative to granting rights to nature, namely, the broadening of an already existing ‘right of appeal’ for (environmental) organisations. Opponents to the initiative argued that the term ‘healthy environment’ was not sufficiently defined to be enshrined as a fundamental right and that the term ‘nature’ was also too vague to provide a basis for legal personality. They also argued that granting nature legal personality conflicted with the concept of personhood that entailed rights as much as obligations. In the plenary session of the National Council, Yves Nidegger from the right-wing Swiss People's Party said in representation of the majority vote of the Legal Affairs Committee:

The second part of the proposal, … to make nature a subject of law contradicts our modern legal order. It is obviously very refreshing and interesting to re-enchant nature by giving it rights, a bit like the shamanism that was our way of thinking in neolithic and ancient times when animals, trees and rivers had a soul, had a spirit and could demand justice. But in modern times, with positive law, we have created a legal order that is totally impervious to this order of things. There are only subjects of law that have rights but also obligations, hence they must involve human beings. . . . We cannot conceive of the possibility of re-enchanting nature to the point of giving it rights of action.21

The argument offers a glimpse into the views and perspectives underpinning the political rationale by which caring for others by granting them rights is coupled with notions of usefulness or purpose. Similarly, in the case of an earlier parliamentary postulate that had requested that Swiss glaciers be granted legal personality, the Federal Council argued that ‘existence alone does not establish legal personality’, but legal entities must pursue an inherent purpose.22 This defined purpose is, according to the rationale, the only reason for their personification. The human-centredness in the opponents’ argument thus completely excludes nonhuman beings as recipients of justice. One could argue that the impossibility of imagining and accommodating any beyond-human purpose suggests a degree of conformism in dealing with systemic problems and a preference for dealing with symptoms instead. Additionally, the quote above shows how the opponents implicitly reproduce the dualistic separation between ‘West’ and ‘Rest’ or between ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous thought’ or so-called ‘worldviews’ common in RoN discourses (see Martin 2020), in this case, by creating a distinction between what they call ‘modernity’ and what they class as ‘pre-modern’, ‘romantic’ or ‘backward’.

It is exactly this view of law—seeking to organise life in line with human interests alone—that the authors of the initiative considered outdated, unproductive, and in need of expansion. To support the argument of feasibility, they referred to existing laws in other countries and international agreements, such as the UN resolution passed on 28 July 2022, which ‘declares access to a clean and healthy environment a human right’,23 as well as to national jurisdictions, like a judgment by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court24 establishing that granting rights to primates was, from a legal point of view and to a certain extent, feasible.

The political nature of the vote on RoN—which to a certain degree reflects business as usual in Swiss parliamentary politics—shows that granting rights to nature is not really about legal doability but about the political willingness to transform democratic systems and legal mechanisms towards feasibility and practical implementation. This willingness is (still) weak. The parliamentary initiative in Switzerland reflects what Tănăsescu (2022: 16) calls ‘an elite proposition in search of a grassroots’, with members of parliament trying to start a broader political discussion.25 In a way, it represents an attempt to change the law through political avenues in order to change people's minds. In this sense, the outcome of the parliamentary initiative was secondary—the initiators expected to lose. The aim was to lay the foundations for societal change. However, after having been rejected by the National Council, the proposition to grant rights to nature is off the table, at least for now. The debate continues through the local and transnational initiatives indicated above and will presumably find its way onto the national political agenda again soon.

We now turn to our second case study, which zooms in on a group of citizens who organised to protect the Wadden Sea, a stretch of sea alongside several European countries. Despite its status as a World Heritage Site, it is vulnerable to destruction and pollution. This initiative sought to establish mechanisms for more protection and accountability in a broader political arena. And even though the initiative was hailed as successful, there were few consequences of this success. A failure after all?

A Legal Experiment: Lawmaking Citizens Demand the Wadden Sea's Political Independence

The Wadden Sea seems to have it all: it is a beauty and diversity hotspot, a refuge for global birdlife, a tourist attraction, and a World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO, the Wadden Sea is the largest tidal flats system in the world, stretching along the coasts of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. Natural processes proceed largely undisturbed, which has led to the physical landscape being listed as ‘preservable heritage’ for its unique geological and ecological values.26 But beyond being a natural idyll, there is yet another feature of this landscape: strong winds, waves, and natural gas hidden beneath its surface also afford the potential to ease Europe's thirst for energy. This abundance, however, is tied to a vulnerable ecosystem.

A trilateral cooperation between the three nations bordering the Wadden Sea first declared its protection in 1978. Today, almost the entire Wadden Sea coast and its islands are protected as national parks and nature reserves (see Figure 2). The area is managed through a combination of national management systems, the trilateral ‘single integrated management plan’, and the Wadden Sea Plan (WSP) implemented by the authorities in charge.27 A joint declaration on the protection of the Wadden Sea was first signed in 1982 and was updated in 2010.28 For the past four decades, partners from politics, nature conservation, science, and administration, as well as local stakeholders involved in this cooperation, have generated a rich source of knowledge and experience that contributed to the Wadden Sea's 2014 designation as a World Heritage Site. As much as these measures may be hailed as productive in protecting the environment, their nonbinding character ensures that there is little accountability in cases of interference or damage to the ecosystem. In this sense, the governance of the Wadden Sea29 and its protection remain firmly in the hands of political authorities, soft laws, and good intentions.

Figure 2.
Figure 2.

Photograph of the nature reserve De Mokbaai, Texel, an island on the Wadden Sea, 2022. Photo by Martha-Cecilia Dietrich.

Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 8, 1; 10.3167/jla.2024.080103

Furthermore, the Wadden Sea lies at the southern edge of the North Sea, one of the most polluted waters in the world (Mayk et al. 2022). Even though effective regulation now reduces pollution, scientists examining the chemical footprint of the North Sea's seabed found ninety highly toxic chemicals and various metals in its sediments, some of them dating back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution (Logemann et al. 2022). ‘People here are not new to the threats to our waters’, says visual artist and writer Ericka Voortman, who moved to the island of Texel many years ago. ‘It is what has made the islanders so protective of the Wadden Sea; because much is at stake from rising sea levels, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity, and there is so little they can do to stop or remedy the damage of such a vast landscape’ (personal conversation in May 2022).

In January 2018, a Dutch initiative passed a motion to declare the Wadden Sea's ecological system a rightsholder. Yet, an essential element that would have made the concept of rightsholder a viable practice, namely an independent guardian body, was dismissed on the grounds that its implementation was ‘unfeasible’.

The initiative to protect the Wadden Sea was started by Taeke Visser, an outdoor sewage plumber from the Frisian community of Dongeradeel who was then a member of the local council. He had been prompted by an article in a national newspaper proposing a solution to the notorious lack of agency for locals to protect their environment, which resonated with him and across communities adjacent to the Wadden Sea. The authors of this article argued that nature should have similar-to-human rights, that an independent body of ‘guardians’ (consisting of scholars, experts, residents, etc.) should monitor its wellbeing and, if necessary, take action on its behalf in national courts (Lambooy et al. 2019).30 If the Wadden Sea had independent advocates, responsible parties could be deterred from inflicting damage or brought to justice more effectively. A few months later, together with some of his fellow councilpersons, Visser put forward a motion entitled ‘Bijzondere rechten UNESCO Werelderfgoed Waddenzee’ (Special Rights for the UNESCO World Heritage Site Wadden Sea). The council accepted the motion with a convincing majority of sixteen against three votes. Visser explained that his community was an old fishing village with adjacent farmland and that as long as there was still room for the fishers and farmers to do their jobs, no one would object. After all, knowing the waters and wildlife better than anyone else, they were already guardians of some sort. It was not the fishers, the farmers, or the tourists against whom the Wadden Sea needed protection, but the government, the European Union, and ‘big money’, Visser noted. His community had seen the impact of container accidents with no binding mechanisms for citizens to demand accountability nationally and transnationally.

While there are no legal precedents of RoN in the Netherlands, initiatives like the one seeking legal status for the Amelisweerd forest in the Utrecht region,31 the river Maas,32 and more recently, the municipality of Eijsden-Margraten (in Limburg),33 which also passed a motion for nature to be granted rights, have been successful in drawing public attention but with no legal consequences as of yet. Environmental legislation relating to the protection of habitats at EU level (Habitats Directive 92/43/EC) have served as an important reference point in an effort to halt development projects.34 Nonetheless, appeals to local authorities to impede the construction of residential areas, business parks, golf courses, or motorways by referring to existing environmental legislation on national and EU levels have failed in favour of economic interests (Bert Hesse from the NGO Das&Boom in personal conversation). Similarly, Visser's two-page motion managed to get the council to agree on granting special rights to the Wadden Sea, and yet these legislative actions remained insufficient.

Despite generating public interest and counting on political support,35 the motion itself was short and vague. In our conversation, Visser reflected on the struggles with loose definitions of the Wadden Sea, indicative of the landscape's diversity and ecological interdependence. They settled on ‘all that is in the sea and fifteen kilometres inland and including the five Dutch islands Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling, Ameland, and Schiermonnikoog’ to delineate the territory. Some of his colleagues argued that their loose demarcation of the Wadden Sea would be a hindrance to its implementation. However, for Visser, this wider entanglement of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems was precisely the reason why demarcations had to remain loose and yet be binding and prosecutable.

‘It could be quite simple’, says Tineke Lambooy, coauthor of the article that inspired Visser's motion, when we met for a workshop in Hamburg. If animals, plants, and microbes that are essential parts of the Wadden Sea's working ecosystem are treated like rightsholders, judicial mechanisms would be mobilised only if elements of this ecosystem were destroyed or hindered from playing their part. ‘As rightsholders, we don't mean individual specimens, but rather, species that form part of a specific habitat need to be able to eat, nest, and reproduce’. Oil spills, industry pollution, or overcrowding in protected areas could be prosecuted with more force or, ideally, avoided.

Visser narrates his actions as if they were an experiment to see how far he could go, but his experience is sobering. After the motion was passed in Dongeradeel, Visser and other supporters took it to the next legislative level. In 2019, the larger council of the municipality of Noardeast-Fryslân also passed the motion of granting special rights to the Wadden Sea,36 but with one crucial reformulation that, according to Visser, reduced the whole endeavour to mere symbolism: While the initiators had urged the city council to appoint an independent body to advocate on behalf of the ecosystem, the council did not proceed with ratifying this element of the motion, thus keeping the Wadden Sea's vulnerable autonomy in government hands. This, according to Visser, meant no significant changes to the status quo.

Speaking on the phone, Visser's tone of voice suggested some shoulder-shrugging when he explained that it was time for others to take the issue of RoN further. As far as he knew, nobody was working on the matter any longer. In his words, it had been easy to get a ‘yes’ for vague ideas, but it seemed unlikely that decisionmakers would willingly end their ability to sidestep the soft laws that protect the Wadden Sea if deemed necessary. ‘No one in politics will vote for less authority unless there are forces from above or below pushing for it, and at the moment, we (the Netherlands) have neither of these’. Visser would like to see the motion being addressed at government level to tackle the fundamental issue of independent guardianship of the Wadden Sea and the applicability of the initiative's suggestions. We conclude that while bottom-up approaches, like in the Spanish Mar Menor case, work in cases of disasters that have already occurred, we still need a bit of trickle-down in order to prevent them.

We now turn to our final case study, the Organisms Democracy art project in Berlin, which puts into practice a political framework that incorporates more-than-human living entities as rightsholders. In doing so, they offer a political framework that not only exposes but creatively addresses the shortcomings on the levels of both governance and representation.

If Nature Had Rights: Organisms Democracy in Berlin-Wedding

On a sunny afternoon, a cricket welcomed us at the independent polity ‘Organisms Republic’ in Berlin-Wedding, where all organisms dwelling there possess rights and engage in democratic proceedings represented by humans. On assembly day, a sense of excitement and nervousness was in the air, as if critical decisions for the Republic were about to be made. But rather than finding concrete answers, we encountered a series of conflicting interests. For example, we argued on behalf of the rapeseed that humans could harvest a few of our leaves to prepare a salad or pesto, but only if they watered us adequately on less rainy days. A main point of discussion was the issue of reciprocity, with the principle of ‘give and take’ being debated but never resolved during the parliament session. Perhaps because we never knew how the plant itself would argue, this exercise revealed many examples of irresolvable issues, thus indicating that it was the problem that needed redefining. One of the main lessons offered by the art project is that representing nature requires advocates to move from granting rights to entities towards recognising the importance of relationships, an issue that is broadly discussed within the RoN debate. And even though the members of Organisms Democracy struggle with the term Rights of ‘Nature’ and do not explicitly use it, they share conceptual grounds.

In a way, Organisms Democracy provides valuable impetus for existing RoN initiatives by revealing problems likely to occur in ‘real’ scenarios. In assessing the social and physical landscapes relevant to the working of Organisms Democracy, we realised the isolation in which academia, law-making, and civil-society initiatives operate in ‘real’ cases. For example, law professor Jens Kersten (2022) proposed amendments to the German constitution incorporating RoN. Kersten's proposal is detailed and well founded, which stands in contrast to many RoN initiatives coming from civil society that struggle to navigate the complexity of law and judicial language. Civil society initiatives have welcomed Kersten's publication; however, no direct cooperation has resulted. While Kersten's and other academic publications do not discuss political strategies to implement RoN, civil society initiatives focus on political implementation with a lack of legal sophistication.

While legal and political initiatives for RoN seem to stagnate in Germany, artistic projects dealing with the issue are flourishing.37 Art projects may be another way of closing the gap between law-making, academia, and civil society when it comes to RoN. Most actors in the RoN landscape agree that societies must change the human–nature relationship inherent to the ways in which people conceive of nature. This brings us back to the dilemma we have identified in every single case study: whether RoN are a consequence of or a tool for changing how humans relate to nature. Hans-Leo Bader, head of the ongoing popular initiative to incorporate RoN into the constitution of Bavaria,38 opined that it was about both: ‘We want to change the constitution . . . but at the same time . . . we want to change people's consciousness to think more about nature as part of themselves’. Similar to the Swiss and Dutch examples, the German RoN landscape, too, is patchy. However, many RoN advocates in Germany see themselves as being part of an interconnected movement, while underneath this discursive surface, the German RoN landscape is multilayered and fragmented, with histories of debates and legal scholarship that can be traced back to the 1980s or 1990s. Discussions on and demands for RoN are not new, but after an epoch of silence, probably due to the failure of early initiatives, they are gaining momentum again (Schröter and Bosselmann 2018). Just recently, RoN found their way into a German regional court convinced that such rights already existed within EU law (Gutmann and García Ruales 2024).

Situated somewhere between legal and social deliberations, art bridges legal propositions with civil society participation, which takes us back to Berlin and Organisms Democracy,39 which has exactly this as its goal. Working at the level of rights, concepts, and their implementation, the project does not aim for a specific legal output but rather a societal one. Organisms Democracy is located on a small parcel of uncultivated land in the densely populated urban district of Berlin-Wedding. Since 2019, it has its own constitution, which is based on the ‘Universal Declaration of Organism Rights’ (UDOR).40 As stated in the UDOR, ‘[i]t is a catalogue of basic rights aspiring to global recognition for the future of all living beings on Earth’. The organisms dwelling on the premises are constantly being mapped in order to determine their presence. This mapping enables them to be part of this democracy and be entitled to human representation in parliament (Article 6). The mapping process has evolved to include the political integration of organisms that have immigrated without human intervention. As per Article 7, these organisms become citizens of the Republic.

Twice a year, the organisation holds its ‘parliamentary sessions’ where the residing organisms (which include bacteria, protozoa, viruses, fungi, mosses, lichens, arthropods, vertebrates, mollusks, worms, trees, shrubs, climbers, herbs, grasses, perennials, and neobiota groups) meet and deliberate, represented by humans, on the fate of the community (see Figures 3a and 3b). These organisms can bring forward different claims. Despite the proclaimed territory of the ‘Republic’ being quite limited, its members as specific types of citizens are too numerous to gather all at once. This idea of a parliament, therefore, ‘consists of 15 members, who are chosen randomly from the community of citizen organisms to serve for one legislative period’ (Art. 9 constitution). The members have different backgrounds and ages. In addition to the usage of a parliament, the Organisms Republic also has an executive branch and a constitutional court (limited to its organisation's forms of play rather than in terms of having the force of legal systems).

Figures 3a, 3b.
Figures 3a, 3b.
Figures 3a, 3b.

Organisms Democracy's parliamentary session, Berlin, 2023. Photos by Georg Reinhardt (3a) and Jenny García Ruales (3b).

Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 8, 1; 10.3167/jla.2024.080103

Organisms Democracy offers a playful glimpse into speaking for nature and assumes that nature already possesses rights. Speaking for nature is treated seriously in the Organisms Republic, with human representatives investing significant effort in preparing for parliamentary sessions, often delving into sciences to determine what their represented species may or should be entitled to. The level of familiarity with existing legal instruments varies among representatives. In our role as participatory observers representing the rapeseed, our preparation to advocate on behalf of this plant involved immersing ourselves in its way of being in the world. While initially having turned to academic papers for insight, we found limited information there and had to rely on ‘google-knowledge’ to advocate for the needs of the rapeseed, such as enough water, a seedbed against rapeseed pests, and friendly fertilisation.

As expressed on different occasions, including the stated aims of Organisms Democracy, its members seek to transcend the concept of Nature (with a capital N) and replace it with a new understanding of politics that includes both humans and organisms, whose mere presence on the site of the Republic affords them with rights. This idea is also reflected in Bruno Latour's ‘Politics of Nature’ (2004) and certain interpretations of RoN and multispecies justice (see Kirksey and Chao 2022). In personal interviews conducted by us, members of the Organisms Parliament and Club Real, the art collective behind the project, clarified that it was the term ‘nature’ in ‘Rights of Nature’ that caused difficulties for them, not the concept of rights per se: ‘We usually don't use this word ‘nature’... . In this discussion, nature is often something that exists outside of humans. . . . We are in a political process with other species, and the result is nature. But it's not that nature is there and we are here’. We agree in the sense that the concept of nature simplifies by way of categorisation. The problem is that this simplification obscures difference and, more than anything, has historically separated humans from all other living entities. This kind of language reinforces—and is the result of—a system that is closed to diverse ways of being and their transformations. Democracy, according to the initiators of the Organisms Republic, has the advantage of being open to incorporating this diversity and constant change as long as democracy is incorporated into people's lives.

However, Organisms Democracy faces difficulties similar to those present in other debates concerning RoN. As mentioned above, it is challenging for members of parliament to know what the organisms they represent really want, as the following quote from one of its members illustrates:

How are we dealing with this individuality versus what is a species? What is an individual? Right now, the citizens are a species. And sometimes, if it's a shrub, we can say, ‘We have one individual’, but with other species, it's much more complicated because one single ant cannot live here alone because it needs a nest; because otherwise, it couldn't survive. . . . When you support ants, you would have to support the nest.41

A related issue within the Organisms Republic is the lack of uniform interests among natural entities, which can often result in conflicts regarding space allocation, dwelling locations, specific needs, and the protection of minorities. On the territory of the Republic, a notable conflict arises, for example, between trees and smaller plants as they compete for sunlight. As a member of the Organisms Parliament reflects in our interview:

This plant could become a linden tree (Tilia x europaea). If it were to grow too big, then of course, it would need to be removed from here because this area is meant for herbs, grasses, and shrubs, which don't want too much shade. However, in the previous parliament, we made a decision that the individuals we have to remove from here can be offered to a friendly project that specifically takes care of green areas in the city. In this way, they can provide a habitat for these plants elsewhere, ensuring they don't have to die.

Organisms Democracy demonstrates the challenges of implementing RoN within a limited territory. In doing so, it opens up a space for political experimentation, imagining multispecies politics that has to involve critical reviewing of political processes and decision-making. It may require an art approach to imagine new (systems of) laws and to also reveal the complexities and contradictions inherent to such a heterogeneous environment and to position ourselves toward rights in all its expressions, as narrated by another member of parliament in the interview:

I have actually become somewhat critical of rights during the course of the project. . . . You can grant or allocate someone a lot of rights, but above all, there needs to be someone who controls, enforces, and implements them. . . . We can see this with human rights as well .... That's why I would say that for us, rights are important, but perhaps even more important are our daily relationships and mutual interconnections. We depend on others for our good lives.

This follows what Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde argues about rights in general: ‘Rights are not monological properties, but relationships that bind their bearer towards bearers of similar rights and whose observance can be demanded by these other persons. In principle, the right concerns the legitimacy of these relationships, not the essence of a subject’ (Bourgeois-Gironde 2023: 24). Efforts to define the subjectivities constituting the ecologies we inhabit, hence, need to grasp the relational aspect between agents for RoN projects not to end in unproductive definitions that are either too exclusive or too vague and unspecific.

Rights of Nature: Transformative Potentials

With many European citizens across the continent calling for a change in the relationship between humans and the natural environment, national courts can present one avenue in which this relationship can be examined, accommodated, and developed. Amidst a global increase in climate litigation cases, various scholars across disciplines have considered RoN a thought-provoking proposition to broaden the limits of nonhuman citizenship while also seeing them as a challenging, if not impossible, endeavour because of the foundational questions they raise within and about the political and legal frameworks of contemporary liberal democracies. But rather than being solely about definitions of what nature is or how it should be organised, RoN invite us to reframe citizens’ relationship with landscapes and environments as situated and relational and to experiment with new forms of advocacy and representation.

Many initiatives that we picked up in our initial landscaping exercise crossed national borders, like the trans-local Appel du Rhône or the World Ethic Forum, but initiatives also materialised in neighbourhoods and parks. Advocates here sought to create networks beyond national frameworks to deal with the urgencies posed by issues deemed local as much as global in scope and scale. In this sense, the ‘national’ is certainly not the only level and may not even be the most adequate level on which to mobilise RoN. And yet, legal mechanisms available within Europe's liberal democracies are currently the most frequented path for citizen-led initiatives and, hence, valuable for assessing the impact of grassroots propositions and the procedural mechanisms that dis/enable them.

Our three case studies on parliamentary, municipal, and grassroots levels have invited us to consider the different avenues and procedures in place for effecting legal changes within European democratic systems. However, we have found that to bring about more substantial environmental changes, greater risk-taking and experimentation are necessary to develop forms of more-than-human citizenship and political representation. While we have seen a lack of political will in pursuing an expansion of existing frameworks, we also consider the procedural processes to be responsible for creating the gaps that exist between governing bodies and grassroots and/or scholarly propositions.

(Legal) scholars and environmental activists who have created a vast body of literature on RoN tend to focus exclusively on ‘landmark’ initiatives, often overlooking those initiatives that have failed to achieve groundbreaking outcomes. However, we have found that these ‘non-cases’ matter for drawing broader lessons about whether RoN—in their various formulations—can be an effective and applicable way of transforming the relationship between humans and natures. Here, we take a step back, reformulate our question, and examine what the act of mobilising law as a form of participation in political and governance systems actually means (Vanhala 2022: 85–86). If law is understood as a way of achieving a claim that is conceived as a right, we, as scholars, need to understand the arguments that contribute to this call for legislation, successful or not.

‘Landscaping Nature's Rights’ in the ways we suggested here meant re-entangling theories and concepts with the social, political, and legal ecologies in which they emerge in order to understand and evaluate how RoN take shape under conditions that are context- and relationship-specific. Exploring RoN as situated practices thus challenged their depiction as a movement, drawing us towards a more qualitative analysis of the environments in which RoN initiatives emerge.

We compared the RoN concept to a rhizome, an underground stem that can sprout roots and shoots to grow into new plants. The rhizome is a metaphor to describe a RoN landscape not as a movement but in movement: where travelling ideas, networking advocates, and collaborating institutions contribute to RoN to circulate, adapt, and spread toward available spaces through fissures and gaps. The law initiatives examined for this article indicate where the grounds are fertile for RoN to enter the discourses and imaginations of broader publics. Just like a rhizome, RoN have not one beginning or end; they have not one but many histories and form part of a patchy landscape with a wide array of influences and determining factors, for a rhizome emerges from the ground when conditions become favourable.

We began this article by asking why most pioneering RoN cases were situated outside Europe despite the numerous legislative initiatives from across the continent. The answers we found were that many European initiatives fail due to a lack of (or inaccessible) democratic mechanisms as well as political will to engage with broader judicial reforms that promise little political gain for the advocating parties. The question is not so much of a legal nature or one of political will, but rather one of political imagination. Imagination here means to consider the benefits of expanding citizens’ involvement in caring for their environments and finding effective ways to sustainably turn these rights into viable legal practices (Naffine 2009: 1).

And yet, we have also found that labelling initiatives as successes or failures too quickly may not do justice to the impact they have. Some of the initiatives, like the parliamentary propositions presented to the Swiss government that we revisited in this article, failed or got stuck in the process due to administrative hurdles or a lack of public engagement. However, we deemed them successful in having kicked off valuable conversations between interest groups, decision-makers, and a wider public. The unspectacular goal is to launch a discussion about care for nature and the urgency of responding to climate change. In this sense, emerging conversations about rights-worthy entities, such as forests, rivers, or endangered species, must form part of our sociopolitical landscape

Other initiatives succeeded but with no consequences to that ‘success’, such as the Dutch initiative that passed a motion to declare the Wadden Sea's ecological system a rightsholder. In spite of this, an essential element that would have turned the concept of rightsholder into a viable practice, namely an independent body of guardians, was dismissed on the grounds of its implementation being unfeasible. To the proponents of the motion, answering the questions of what ‘nature’ actually meant in the case of the Wadden Sea and who would qualify as a ‘guardian’ was not an impossible task but required dedication and political will to experiment in search of possible answers.

The word ‘implementation’ appears to be the barrier standing between RoN as a concept and as a practice. In both of the above initiatives, we have seen that the political discussion over expanding existing legal concepts to incorporate Rights of Nature is quickly throttled by the seeming impossibility of imagining a different kind of social organisation and legal order. Imagining politics, law, and justice ‘otherwise’ also means destabilising grounds, taking risks, and changing negotiations in conceiving natures in ways that go beyond (concepts of) inanimate objects or human property—not too dissimilar from the struggles fought over women's rights or the abolition of slavery (Stone 1972). The assumed unmanageability of what is unknown seems to be both cause and effect in disabling efforts to rethink the human–environment relationship as a multiple one. But vagueness can also be a start, a possibility, or a work-in-progress that bears the freedom to create.

Organisms Democracy in Berlin Wedding provides a legal playground for exploring how advocacy could work for the rights of all species living there, including bacteria, fungi, arthropods, herbs, and others, and what would happen if they were granted constitutional rights. The artistic initiative engages in debates that remarkably resemble those of ‘real’ RoN initiatives. Talking with and about natures is more of a political than a legal issue even in Organisms Democracy. The project assumes that giving rights to nature's entities, species, or organisms is only a first step. What really matters is giving life and nuance to the task of caring and speaking on behalf of a multiplicity of life forms. This process cannot be reduced to a bureaucratic or technical procedure or solely to an ideological project. Rather, it is about initiating a further transformational change that is deeply political and social. With this in mind, we would like to close this text with the words of Yaku Viteri Gualinga from the Kichwa People of Sarayaku and a pioneering voice in debates around RoN, who said about bringing RoN to Western courts: ‘Even a well-braided braid still needs to be woven’ (García Ruales and Viteri Gualinga 2024).

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies for funding this research. We are also grateful to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research for supporting us in organising the workshop ‘Ontological and Normative Collisions: Struggles over Nature's Rights’ in 2021, which planted the seeds for this collaboration. A very special thanks to our colleagues at Amsterdam University's Anthropology Department, Tina Harris, Julie McBrien, Jorge Nuñez, Rachel Spronk, and Rahil Roodzas, for reading drafts of this article. Their comments and insights were greatly appreciated.

Notes

1

This particularly applies in the field of (compensating for) loss and damage. For more, see https://clxtoolkit.com/legalactions/climate-justice-pioneering-research-litigation-and-collaborations-with-scientists-to-advance-loss-and-damage-claims/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

2

See, for instance, the online press conference organised by www.transparenz.tv on the occasion of International Earth Day 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-6E_IVX0Ds, (accessed 20 December 2023).

3

However, several studies dealing critically with RoN have pointed to the difficulties of RoN court judgement implementation as well as RoN mobilisation working to the detriment of marginalised communities and Nature, allowing ‘extractive projects and interests … [to] take precedence over human and non-human rights’ (González Serrano 2024: 1; see also Melo-Ascencio 2024).

6

Now that the Mar Menor has been granted legal personality, advocates formed the association AMARME. With the so-called ‘pacto por el Mar Menor’, they established a platform for scientists and lawyers to inform the public about the ecology of the Mar Menor and put pressure on the government with legal complaints. See https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/projecten/designing-selfrepresentation-of-water-bodies-in-europe/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

7

See, for instance, the case of Frome Town Council (UK), which intended to pass a bylaw giving part of the river Frome and the adjacent Rodden meadow the status of a legal person. The proposition involved tasking a local charity to become guardians to balance the river and meadow's interests with the health and safety of local people. The law was turned down in 2020. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/17/laws-of-nature-could-uk-rivers-be-given-same-rights-as-people-aoe (accessed on December, 20, 2023).

8

See, for instance, the case of the Appel du Rhône that seeks a binational agreement between France and Switzerland to protect the river Rhône by awarding it special rights. See https://www.appeldurhone.org/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

9

See, for instance, the case of the ‘Rights of Nature in Ireland: Towards a Living Island of Rights-Bearing-Communities’ from 2022, where legal professionals across Ireland and the UK collaborated to submit a proposition for constitutional amendments to the Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss hosted by the Irish Government. See https://ejni.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/EJNI-Submission-to-CA-Sept-2022.pdf (accessed 20 December 2023).

10

See, for instance, the historic ‘Seals Charge’ from 1988 where the Verwaltungsgericht (Adminstrative Court) in Hamburg filed and later dismissed a claim from the seals of the North Sea (represented by eight environmental organisations) against the Federal Republic of Germany (represented by then-minister of transportation Jürgen Wanke, CSU) for the lethal pollution of the North Sea.

11

This refers to law projects filed before January 2022, excluding policies projects and initiatives.

12

See, for instance, the case of the Belgian petition to review environmental rights to also include RoN. The legal process including a lawsuit against the Belgian state and the appeal has taken almost ten years. https://affaire-climat.be/en (accessed on December, 20, 2023).

15

See https://www.appeldurhone.org/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

17

See https://www.r-reuss.ch/index.html (accessed 8 July 2024).

18

Items of business 21.436–440, ‘Recht auf gesunde Umwelt und Rechte der Natur’, see https://www.parlament.ch/de/ratsbetrieb/suche-curia-vista/geschaeft?AffairId=20210436 (accessed 20 December 2023).

21

See https://www.parlament.ch/de/ratsbetrieb/amtliches-bulletin/amtliches-bulletin-die-verhandlungen?SubjectId=59236#votum6 (accessed 20 December 2023), translated from French to English by Siân Affolter.

23

UN General Assembly declares access to clean and healthy environment a universal human right | UN News, see https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1123482 (accessed 20 December 2023).

24

BGE 147 I 183, see 147 I 183—Schweizerisches Bundesgericht (bger.ch) (accessed 20 December 2023).

25

This does not mean that the initiative emerged out of a void. The original idea to launch the parliamentary initiative emerged from a meeting organised by the founders of the World Ethic Forum in November 2020, which Marionna Schlatter attended. There, she was lobbied to start the initiative. Doris Ragettli, the co-founder of Rights of Mother Earth, an organisation dedicated to getting the UN to adopt the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and involved with the World Ethic Forum, was also present at this meeting. She and Linard Bardill, founder of the World Ethic Forum and the Centre for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organisation set up by the founders of the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund (CELDF), provided advice in drafting the initiative.

26

See https://www.waddensea-worldheritage.org/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

29

Also involved are large-scale fisheries, industrial facilities, harbours and maritime traffic, residential and tourism development, the extraction of natural resources, and renewable energy infrastructures.

32

See https://maascleanup.nl/actie/petitie/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

34

In 1998, for instance, NGOs like Das&Boom initiated a ‘Right to Nature’ discussion around the protection of the habitat of vulnerable species like the European hamster (korenwolf) (Cricetus cricetus), the otter (Lutrinae), the grouse (Tetraonini), or the sedge snail (Vertigo moulinsiana) and attained great public and media attention. The korenwolf, a hamster on the verge of extinction, became a symbol for the inadequate implementation of EU policies and other treaties in the Netherlands and the subject of successful legal and administrative action by interest groups and stakeholders. See https://www.dutchnews.nl/2011/08/wild_hamster_wins_right_to_fre/ (accessed 25 November 2024).

37

See for example Raddatz 2023 for RoN and theatre.

38

See https://gibdernaturrecht.muc-mib.de/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

39

See https://organismendemokratie.org/ueber/ (accessed 20 December 2023).

40

English version available at: https://organismendemokratie.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/19DeclarationOrgRights.pdf (accessed 20 December 2023).

41

This points to the difficult question, whether the concept of individual/subjective rights is suitable for RoN. Most RoN protect processes and collectivites rather than single natural individuals. For the Ecuadorian case cf. Gutmann 2021a.

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  • International Rivers (2020), Authors Report on Rights of Rivers: A Global Survey of the Rapidly Developing Rights of Nature Jurisprudence Pertaining to Rivers. Nr. 6. (Vance Center for International Justice).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kersten, J. (2022), Das ökologische Grundgesetz (Munich: C.H. Beck).

  • Kirksey, E. and S. Chao (2022), ‘Introduction: Who Benefits from Multispecies Justice?’ in Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 122.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kotzé, L. and K. Rakhyun (2019), ‘Earth System Law: The Juridical Dimensions of Earth System Governance’, Earth System Governance 1: 112.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lambooy, T., J. van de Venis, and C. Stokkermans (2019), ‘A Case for Granting Legal Personality to the Dutch Part of the Wadden Sea’, Water International 44, no. 6/7: 786803.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

  • Lawy, J. R. (2017), ‘Theorizing Voice: Performativity, Politics, and Listening’, Anthropological Theory 17, no. 2: 192215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617713138.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Logemann, A., M. Reininghaus, A. Ebeling Schmidt, T. Zimmermann, H. Wolschke, J. Friedrich, B. Brockmeyer, D. Pröfrock, and G. Witt (2022), ‘Assessing the Chemical Anthropocene: Development of the Legacy Pollution Fingerprint in the North Sea During the Last Century’, Environmental Pollution 302, no. 80: 119040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119040.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Marshall, V. (2019), ‘Removing the Veil from the ‘Rights of Nature’: The Dichotomy between First Nations Customary Rights and Environmental Legal Personhood’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45, no. 2: 233248. https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2019.1802154.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Martin, K. (2020), ‘Subaltern Perspectives in Post-Human Theory’, Anthropological Theory 20, no. 3: 357382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618794085.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mayk, D., E. M. Harper, J. Fietzke, T. Backeljau, and L. S. Peck (2022), ‘130 Years of Heavy Metal Pollution Archived in the Shell of the Intertidal Dog Whelk, Nucella lapillus (Gastropoda, Muricidae)’, Marine Pollution Bulletin 185: 18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.114286.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Melo-Ascencio, D. A. (2024), ‘A Postcolonial Marxist Critique of the River-as-Subject: Situating the Atrato River in Its Development Aporias’, Antipode 56, no. 5: 17541774. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13052.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press.

  • Naffine, N. (2009), Law's Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person (Oxford/Portland: Hart Publishing).

  • Paiement, P. (2022), Rights of Nature, Globalisation and Legal Pluralism: The Netherlands Country Report. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4218973.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Putzer, A., T. Lambooy, R. Jeurissen, and E. Kim (2022), ‘Putting the Rights of Nature on the Map: A Quantitative Analysis of Rights of Nature Initiatives across the World’, Journal of Maps 18, no. 1: 8996. https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2022.2079432.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Revill, G. 2021. ‘Voicing the Environment: Latour, Peirce, and an Expanded Politics’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 1: 121138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820944521.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Raddatz, F. (2023), ‘Die Auferstehung des politischen Theaters—zu den Rechten der Natur auf der Bühne’, in Matthias Kramm (ed.), Rechte für Flüsse, Berge und Wälder: Eine neue Perspektive für den Naturschutz? (Munich: Oekom), 84105.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rodríguez-Garavito, C. (2022). Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilisation Can Bolster Climate Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Schröter, M. W. and K. Bosselmann (2018), ‘Die Robbenklage im Lichte der Nachhaltigkeit’, Zeitschrift für Umweltrecht 4: 95205.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Silva Santiesteban, R. (ed.). (2021), Mujeres Indígenas Frente al Cambio Climático (Place: Grupo Internacional de Trabajo sobre asuntos Indígenas [IWGIA]).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stone, C. D. (1972), ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review 45: 450501.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tănăsescu, M. (2022), Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag).

  • Tigre, M. A. (2022). ‘Climate Change and Indigenous Groups: The Rise of Indigenous Voices in Climate Litigation’, ePublica 9, no. 3, 214260.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tsing, A. L., A. S. Mathews, and N. Bubandt (2019), ‘Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20’, Current Anthropology 60, S20: S186S197. https://doi.org/10.1086/703391.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Vanhala, L. (2022), ‘The Social and Political Life of Climate Change Litigation: Mobilizing the Law to Address the Climate Crisis’, in César Rodríguez-Garavito (ed.), Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilisation Can Bolster Climate Action, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 8494. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009106214.004.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Viaene, L. (2022), ‘Can Rights of Nature Save Us from the Anthropocene Catastrophe? Some Critical Reflections from the Field’, Asian Journal of Law and Society 9: 187206.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Vicente Giménez, T. and E. Salazar Ortuño (2024), ‘An Ecological Citizenship's Triumph: From the Popular Legislative Initiative to the Rights Granted for the Mar Menor’, in J. García Ruales, K. Hovden, H. Kopnina, C. Robertson, and H. Shoukens (eds.) Rights of Nature in Europe: Encounters and Visions (New York: Routledge), 83102.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Weidmann, A. (2014), ‘Anthropology and Voice’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 3751. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030050.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

Contributor Notes

Dr. Martha-Cecilia Dietrich is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the entanglements of social and environmental justice in Latin American post-conflict societies. Email: m.c.dietrich@uva.nl.

Dr. Laura Affolter is a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Group ‘Sociology of Law’ at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. She is currently exploring how the rights of nature and buen vivir are negotiated in legal struggles over large-scale mining in Ecuador. Email: laura.affolter@his-online.de.

Dr. Andreas Gutmann is a legal scholar specialising in the Rights of Nature. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the Kassel Institute for Sustainability, department ‘Just Transitions’, Kassel University. Email: andreas.gutmann@uni-kassel.de.

Jenny García Ruales is a doctoral candidate at the Philipps University of Marburg and an associate researcher at the Max Planck Fellow Group ‘Environmental Rights in a Cultural Context’ at the Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Her thesis is situated in the fields of Environmental Anthropology, Anthropology of Nature, and Legal Anthropology. Email: jenny.garcia_ruales@uni-erfurt.de.

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  • Figures 1a, 1b.

    Parliamentary discussion in Bern. Screenshots of recordings on Simplex TV, public domain, 2022.

  • Figure 2.

    Photograph of the nature reserve De Mokbaai, Texel, an island on the Wadden Sea, 2022. Photo by Martha-Cecilia Dietrich.

  • Figures 3a, 3b.

    Organisms Democracy's parliamentary session, Berlin, 2023. Photos by Georg Reinhardt (3a) and Jenny García Ruales (3b).

  • Acosta Espinoza, A. (2021) Los derechos de la naturaleza: una historia con futuro. FLACSO Ecuador, 5 of July, video archive MP4, 00:58:57.

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  • Affolter, L. (2020), ‘The Responsibility to Prevent Future Harm: Anti-Mining Struggles, the State, and Constitutional Lawsuits in Ecuador’, Journal of Legal Anthropology 4, no. 2: 7899. https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2020.040405.

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  • Auz, J. (2022), ‘Human Rights-Based Climate Litigation: A Latin American Cartography’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 13, no. 1: 114136. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2022.01.05.

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  • Bourgeois-Gironde, S. (2023), Wie uns das Recht der Natur näher bringt (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz).

  • Bregenzer, I. (1894), Their-Ethik. Darstellung der sittlichen und rechtlichen Beziehungen zwischen Mensch und Thier (Bamberg: C. C. Brucker Verlag).

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  • Burgers, L. and J. den Outer (2021), Compendium Rights of Nature — Case Studies from Six Continents (Amsterdam: Embassy of the North Sea).

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  • Darpö, J. (2021), ‘Can Nature Get It Right? A Study on Rights of Nature in the European Context’. Edited by the Policy Department for CitizensRights and Constitutional Affairs, Directorate-General for Internal Policies (Strasbourg: European Parliament).

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  • Deleuze, G. and F. L. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

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  • Dinzelbacher, P. (2002), ‘Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3: 405421.

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    • Export Citation
  • Fischer-Lescano, A. (2020), ‘Nature as a Legal Person: Proxy Constellations in Law’, Law & Literature 32, no. 2: 237262.

  • García Ruales, J. and Y. Viteri Gualinga (2024), ‘A well-braided (knowledge) braid: Lessons learned from the Kawsak Sacha and the forest beings to Europe’, in Jenny García Ruales, Katarina Hovden, Helen Kopnina, Colin Robertson, and Hendrik Shoukens (eds.), Rights of Nature in Europe: Encounters and Visions (New York: Routledge), 2744.

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  • García Ruales, J. (2024), ‘Forest Moralities, Kindred Knowledge and Sacha Runakuna: Kawsak Sacha as Law’. The International Journal of Human Rights, 125. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2024.2362837.

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  • González-Serrano, M. X. (2024), ‘Rights of Nature, an Ornamental Legal Framework: Water Extractivism and Backbone Rivers with Rights in Colombia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 121. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2349228.

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  • Gutmann, A. (2021a), ‘Pachamama as a Legal Person? Rights of Nature and Indigenous Thought in Ecuador’, in Daniel Corrigan and Markku Oksanen (eds.), Rights of Nature: A Re-Examination (New York: Routledge), 3650.

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  • Gutmann, A. (2021b), ‘Der globale Trend zu Rechten der Natur: Entsteht ein dekoloniales und ökologisches Recht von unten?’ in Frank Adloff and Tanja Busse (eds.), Welche Rechte braucht die Natur? (Frankfurt: Campus), 133244.

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  • Gutmann, A. and J. García Ruales (2024), ‘Von Flüssen und Dieselabgasen: Rechte der Natur am LG Erfurt’, Verfassungsblog 18 June 2024, https://verfassungsblog.de/rechte-der-natur-rio-machangara-dieselskandal/.

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  • International Rivers (2020), Authors Report on Rights of Rivers: A Global Survey of the Rapidly Developing Rights of Nature Jurisprudence Pertaining to Rivers. Nr. 6. (Vance Center for International Justice).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kersten, J. (2022), Das ökologische Grundgesetz (Munich: C.H. Beck).

  • Kirksey, E. and S. Chao (2022), ‘Introduction: Who Benefits from Multispecies Justice?’ in Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 122.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kotzé, L. and K. Rakhyun (2019), ‘Earth System Law: The Juridical Dimensions of Earth System Governance’, Earth System Governance 1: 112.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lambooy, T., J. van de Venis, and C. Stokkermans (2019), ‘A Case for Granting Legal Personality to the Dutch Part of the Wadden Sea’, Water International 44, no. 6/7: 786803.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

  • Lawy, J. R. (2017), ‘Theorizing Voice: Performativity, Politics, and Listening’, Anthropological Theory 17, no. 2: 192215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617713138.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Logemann, A., M. Reininghaus, A. Ebeling Schmidt, T. Zimmermann, H. Wolschke, J. Friedrich, B. Brockmeyer, D. Pröfrock, and G. Witt (2022), ‘Assessing the Chemical Anthropocene: Development of the Legacy Pollution Fingerprint in the North Sea During the Last Century’, Environmental Pollution 302, no. 80: 119040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119040.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Marshall, V. (2019), ‘Removing the Veil from the ‘Rights of Nature’: The Dichotomy between First Nations Customary Rights and Environmental Legal Personhood’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45, no. 2: 233248. https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2019.1802154.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Martin, K. (2020), ‘Subaltern Perspectives in Post-Human Theory’, Anthropological Theory 20, no. 3: 357382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618794085.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mayk, D., E. M. Harper, J. Fietzke, T. Backeljau, and L. S. Peck (2022), ‘130 Years of Heavy Metal Pollution Archived in the Shell of the Intertidal Dog Whelk, Nucella lapillus (Gastropoda, Muricidae)’, Marine Pollution Bulletin 185: 18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.114286.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Melo-Ascencio, D. A. (2024), ‘A Postcolonial Marxist Critique of the River-as-Subject: Situating the Atrato River in Its Development Aporias’, Antipode 56, no. 5: 17541774. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13052.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press.

  • Naffine, N. (2009), Law's Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person (Oxford/Portland: Hart Publishing).

  • Paiement, P. (2022), Rights of Nature, Globalisation and Legal Pluralism: The Netherlands Country Report. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4218973.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Putzer, A., T. Lambooy, R. Jeurissen, and E. Kim (2022), ‘Putting the Rights of Nature on the Map: A Quantitative Analysis of Rights of Nature Initiatives across the World’, Journal of Maps 18, no. 1: 8996. https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2022.2079432.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Revill, G. 2021. ‘Voicing the Environment: Latour, Peirce, and an Expanded Politics’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 1: 121138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820944521.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Raddatz, F. (2023), ‘Die Auferstehung des politischen Theaters—zu den Rechten der Natur auf der Bühne’, in Matthias Kramm (ed.), Rechte für Flüsse, Berge und Wälder: Eine neue Perspektive für den Naturschutz? (Munich: Oekom), 84105.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rodríguez-Garavito, C. (2022). Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilisation Can Bolster Climate Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Schröter, M. W. and K. Bosselmann (2018), ‘Die Robbenklage im Lichte der Nachhaltigkeit’, Zeitschrift für Umweltrecht 4: 95205.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Silva Santiesteban, R. (ed.). (2021), Mujeres Indígenas Frente al Cambio Climático (Place: Grupo Internacional de Trabajo sobre asuntos Indígenas [IWGIA]).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stone, C. D. (1972), ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review 45: 450501.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tănăsescu, M. (2022), Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag).

  • Tigre, M. A. (2022). ‘Climate Change and Indigenous Groups: The Rise of Indigenous Voices in Climate Litigation’, ePublica 9, no. 3, 214260.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tsing, A. L., A. S. Mathews, and N. Bubandt (2019), ‘Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20’, Current Anthropology 60, S20: S186S197. https://doi.org/10.1086/703391.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Vanhala, L. (2022), ‘The Social and Political Life of Climate Change Litigation: Mobilizing the Law to Address the Climate Crisis’, in César Rodríguez-Garavito (ed.), Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilisation Can Bolster Climate Action, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 8494. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009106214.004.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Viaene, L. (2022), ‘Can Rights of Nature Save Us from the Anthropocene Catastrophe? Some Critical Reflections from the Field’, Asian Journal of Law and Society 9: 187206.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Vicente Giménez, T. and E. Salazar Ortuño (2024), ‘An Ecological Citizenship's Triumph: From the Popular Legislative Initiative to the Rights Granted for the Mar Menor’, in J. García Ruales, K. Hovden, H. Kopnina, C. Robertson, and H. Shoukens (eds.) Rights of Nature in Europe: Encounters and Visions (New York: Routledge), 83102.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Weidmann, A. (2014), ‘Anthropology and Voice’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 3751. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030050.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

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