Realizing Rights of Nature

The project Realizing the Rights of Nature: Sustainable Development and Democracy examines issues raised in the 2030 Agenda, the UN’s target document for economically, socially and environmentally sustainable development. The project’s starting point is the various initiatives taken by activists, legislators and courts over the past fifteen years to protect nature from exploitation by attributing independent rights and intrinsic value to mountains, rivers or nature as a whole. These initiatives are collectively known as the Rights of Nature (RoN). What they have in common is that nature is in some form considered a subject with rights. The idea that nature has its own rights is one of many possible ways to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda.

We examine the potential of the notion of nature as an independent legal subject from a political, legal and historical perspective. The idea of ​​the rights of nature and nature as a legal subject appears as a new way of thinking about rights. But we place it in a longer tradition of liberalism and rights thinking where individual property rights, freedom of contract and legal subjectivity are both supporting ideas and fundamental premises.

In this liberal tradition, there are built-in tensions between the individual, the collective and “nature”. We have identified four central areas of tension that we examine in more detail in the project: (1) the contradiction between property rights and RoN, (2) the tension between human rights and RoN, (3) the contradiction between individual and collective rights, (4) the difficulty for democratic institutions that protect individual human rights to also guarantee rights for non-human subjects.

These issues pose challenges for today's liberal market economies. We believe that history can contribute to understanding the issues surrounding RoN as a possible path to sustainable and inclusive development.