Stories of Systemic Failure? Landscaping the Rights of Nature in Europe

In Europe, calls for ecosystems to be granted rights as legal subjects are mounting. While environmental justice campaigners celebrate the Rights of Nature as a global movement, sceptics have reservations as to the extent to which this “thought experiment” can actually contribute to broadening the contours of beyond-human citizenship. Socio-legal research on the Rights of Nature has tended to focus on the judicial and discursive strategies of the few success stories from around the globe. Less attention has been 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 look at some of the procedures available to citizens that dis/enable the introduction of Nature’s Rights into the courts of Europe. This article identifies and examines three socio-political territories from our fieldwork sites in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany in which procedures characteristic of Europe’s democratic systems are used to mobilise for the Rights of Nature: national legal governance, international networks of lobbying groups and artistic interventions in public space. By engaging ethnographically with the wider socio-political processes of establishing Rights of Nature in Europe, we seek to offer a qualitative view on the possibilities and limitations of Europe’s liberal democracies in effecting socio-political transformations.