Whose Body of Water? Rights of Nature as Environmental Guardianship for Sweden

We are in the midst of a planetary emergency, and the search for tools that enable a shift in humanities course are of existential matter. Our fossil fuelled industrial modern societies are planned according to a world view where human beings have seen ourselves as above nature, with a limitless right to dominate, control and exploit it. What happens if we instead acknowledge that the survival of humans is intimately connected to the rights of nature to survive - what development for transition would then be released?

According to the two reports from IPCC (2022) and IPBES (2019), which summarize the climate and biodiversity research, it is necessary to use system innovations on a cultural- and legislative level to protect and restore life supporting ecosystems related to water circulation. Recognizing Rights of Nature (RoN) in legislation is a system innovation that has been tried around the world with unexpectedly good results in dealing with complex environmental issues. However, there is still much work to be done when it comes to how to understand RoN, how to justify it morally, and how to implement RoN locally, if it will have global impact.

The main purpose of the research project is to analyze how RoN may be understood and possibly integrated into Swedish law and what sustainable development (welfare innovations and ecologically sustainable entrepreneurship) it would make possible. We will specifically explore the process of making lake Vättern a legal subject - thereby analyzing what forms of societal transitions are possible if nature was acknowledged to have juridical and accompanied moral rights.

In six Transition Labs we will examine how the situation for Vättern would change if the lake had rights - can this ensure its survival as a valuable ecosystem? This project focuses on in which way a democratic just transition can be supported by changed environmental culture and laws by expanding the democratic governance to include nature as a subject and its moral underpinnings. It has emphasis on how Rights of Nature has been used and potentially could be used as mechanisms to address a complex set of environmental issues on the local, national as well as international level. 

Members

• Martin Hultman Senior Researcher, Science, Technology and Society, Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers

• Åsa Nilsson Dahlström Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, HLK, Jönköping University

• Thomas Laurien Designer, Senior Lecturer in Design, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg

• Marie Widengård Researcher, The School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

• Mariam Kanyama Carlsson Environmental lawyer and PhD student at Chalmers