Articulating Natures in Democracy, Governance, and Law

The Anthropocene represents a double crisis: a very material crisis that threatens the continued existence of the conditions for the flourishing of human and much more than human life on this planet, and a cosmological crisis that challenges the ontological divide between the two spheres of nature and culture. These two dimensions of the crisis are hard to overcome with separately, because locating what the moderns call "nature" in an area that they standardise, separate and locate outside of the human, or which they instrumentalise for their own purposes, makes it difficult or even impossible to deal with the material planetary crisis. 

Constitutive for much of modern thinking, this divide also materializes itself in political, judicial and social institutions and the practices associated with them. Departing from the assumption that this hierarchical dualism between human and nature is a central condition for the ongoing destruction of more-than-human worlds, I am interested in how “nature” and particular more-than human relations, entities, and worlds can be enacted and articulated in alternative non-dualist and non-anthropocentric practices of democracy, governance and jurisdiction. I will study such practices empirically (for example the innovations around the rights on nature) as well as include conceptual reflections on how more-than-human entities and their interests, perspectives or signals can be integrated into such processes.