Bringing about the global movement for the rights of nature: sites and practices for intelligibility

Abstract

Legal scholars, environmental organizations, indigenous groups and activists from around the world are energizing an emergent global movement on the rights of nature. To face the environmental crisis, these heterogeneous actors are coming together to reconceptualize nature as a legal subject. In this article, I examine Democracy Schools and Awakening the Dreamer Symposia (ADS) to establish where and how this emergent movement is being organized. The meaning structures, knowledge stocks and identity cues that characterize it are made intelligible to potential adherents through these seminars and workshops. Interpretive analysis reveals that Democracy Schools and ADSs are distinctively mobile and replicable infrastructures. The concept of ‘stagings' was developed to help examine cultural and spatial dynamics in heterogeneous and extensive collective action.

“Rights of nature” in translation: Assemblage geographies, boundary objects, and translocal social movements

“…As Espinosa argues, translation is one of the

key mechanisms for articulation and coalition building among heterogeneous individuals, organizations and movements that attain the reach and scope of global movements … Translations are cultural and social processes of simultaneous replication, imitation and differentiation resulting from continual confrontations between knowledge formations. (, p. 467)

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“…This treatment would not illuminate the issues of place and difference that are central to my concerns here, nor would it exceed the mere description of multitude of connections in the world. While it might enable us to describe different outcomes of rights of nature projects, it would not provide an analytic attentive to the dynamics of difference, boundaries, and translation that infuse and motivate social movements (Espinosa, ). Bounding the concept of assemblage and making it analytically useful requires that we attend to epistemological and ontological issues, particularly issues of boundaries and (in this case, cultural) difference.…”

“…First, “rights of nature” proliferates across categories of geographical, cultural, political, and ontological difference as it assembles “nature” and “personhood” from heterogeneous elements. “Rights of nature” as a juridical form assigns personhood to nature in ways that mobilise both transnational and place‐based meanings and practices while drawing on and producing hybrid forms of knowledge (Espinosa, ). Cases characterise “nature” in numerous ways: as the individual, dynamic personalities of rivers; as ecosystems; as Pachamama ; as a worldly manifestation of a single formless god, and so on.…”

“…In the process, these collaborations remake “global” space, contributing new concepts, relations, and dynamics into the fold. For example, through the Awakening the Dreamer symposia (one node of rights of nature activism) institutional networks linking US environmental groups and Amazonian people have produced hybrid cosmological practices, while forging new circulations of people and capital through spiritual‐ecotourism (Espinosa, , p. 475). In becoming de‐ and reterritorialised through processes of circulation and translation, “rights of nature” produces new socio‐spatial relations across scales and sites, producing new spaces, meanings, and materialities in the process.…”

Trajectories of translation

“…In this sense, our usage follows Eden Kinkaid’s (2019) observation that acts of translation “paradoxically produce the ‘global’... as a kind of relay or collaboration around a shared concept” (566). Parallel to Zhao (2020), Kinkaid draws on Cristina Espinosa’s argument that translations are not acts of equivalence but “cultural and social processes of simultaneous replication, imitation and differentiation resulting from continual confrontations between knowledge formations” (Espinosa, 2017: 467).…”