Property and place attachment: a legal geographical analysis of biodiversity law reform in New South Wales

Abstract

Environmental indicators suggest that the legislation regulating land clearing in NSW should be strengthened. However, reform has moved in the opposite direction, continuously weakening the law in response to the marginal but politically significant argument that the Act undermined sacrosanct private property rights. The cultural mythology around property and the legal discourse of property dephysicalise relations between people and place, transforming them into categories of abstract and predominantly commercial rights, and foster a vocabulary of entitlement to land as a civil and political right. Opponents to the existing legislation have also argued that it insufficiently accommodates vernacular knowledge regarding locally specific conditions and variations, and creates disrespect and mistrust between government and landholders. This paper interrogates the relationships between the key arguments of opponents to the existing legislation with place attachment. Place attachment describes the bond between people and place and is usually regarded as being positive for environmental protection. However, it may also underpin reactionary place‐protective behaviours including NIMBYism, the preservation of degraded landscapes and inappropriate place management practices, including the institution of private property itself. Paradoxically, while place‐protective resistance may appear to conflict with conservation, potential for resolution to this ongoing legal and geographical crisis in biodiversity conservation may be found through highlighting the common ground of place connection and inter‐dependence, and by rephysicalising law to better articulate shared interests in healthy environments beyond the narrow prism of individual property rights. This endeavour may be best achieved through a multi‐scalar and poly‐vocal participatory process, to ensure such narrow and monological interests do not hold disproportionate sway and address path dependency and legacy issues.

Recognising Indigenous customary law of totemic plant species: Challenges and pathways

“…This includes understanding the complexities of legal pluralism and layered legal regimes in postcolonial and non‐Western contexts (see Forsyth, ; Gillespie, ). Where legal geography meets legal pluralism, we acknowledge authors such as Vermeylin (, p. 53) who encourages researchers to “embrace the idea of a hybrid legal space where law‐making consists of a praxis that interlocks a whole range of legal actors ranging from international institutions to daily localised legal actors.” It also means understanding the mutual co‐constitution of both law and place, which is often discussed by legal geographers in regards to the enactment of planning and environmental laws, through case law analysis, and in studying the enactment of laws in different places (Bartel & Graham, ; Bennett & Layard, ; Delaney, ). In this case the mutual co‐constitution of law and place/country/nature goes especially deep, and is encompassed by Indigenous origin beliefs and stories.…”

Feminist political ecology and legal geography: A case study of the Tonle Sap protected wetlands of Cambodia

“…Legal geographers 'splice' the world and provide us with insights into the 'locally enacted encodings' enabling the 'weav[ing] together [of] spatial and legal meaning[s]' (Bennett and Layard, 2015: 409-410). While LG's contribution to discourse issues of environmental regulation can often be abstract and controversial, it is an area of increasing interest to scholars (for example, Jessup, 2015;O'Donnell, 2016; see Bartel and Graham, 2016;Sherval and Graham, 2013). This place-based emphasis on setting draws our attention to similar scholarship from political ecology (PE) that focuses on people-power-decision-making dynamics in context; yet few explicitly link PE with the LG project (with the notable exception of Delaney, 2016).…”

Coupling property rights with responsibilities to improve conservation outcomes across land and seascapes

“…For example, landholders often have rights to clear native vegetation on their property to create commercial profitability in land. Exercise of these rights across large geographic scales, however, can fail to take account of the cumulative effects of activities on individual properties, resulting in widespread land and water degradation, biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change (e.g., Bartel & Graham, 2016; Nery, Sadler, White, & Polyakov, 2019). These ecological consequences arise primarily due to the inability of property rights regimes to protect both ecosystem goods and services (e.g., Chan, Satterfield, & Goldstein, 2012; Lant, Ruhl, & Kraft, 2008); to account for the interconnectedness of social‐ecological systems (e.g., Cooke & Moon, 2015; Freyfogle, 2001); and to balance rights with responsibilities (e.g., Guth, 2008; Rissman, 2013; Tomas, 2011).…”