Towards sustainable property? Exploring the entanglement of ownership and sustainability

Abstract

This article explores the relation between ownership and sustainability on a conceptual level. It specifically examines different imaginaries of sustainable property by asking how private property rights and their restrictions are conceptualized as instruments for sustainability. To do so, conflicting notions of property that underlie Western jurisprudence and political theory are contrasted. This brings us to the identification of two major traditions in property thought that build on atomist or relational conceptions of society and property, respectively. Property might be conceived as an owner’s exclusive control over an object, or as a ‘bundle of rights’ that comprises entitlements, restrictions, and obligations to various actors. Largely within the paradigm of modernization as a trajectory of sustainability, these two fundamental traditions in property theory relate to different approaches to encode sustainability into property law: i) propertization, i.e. the extension of private property forms, as in the case of carbon emissions trading schemes; ii) the acknowledgment of social and environmental obligations inherent to property, illustrated by the social obligation norm in German law.

Kapitalismus und Nachhaltigkeit

“…Beschränkungen sind dann dem Eigentum äußerlich. Es gibt aber auch andere Konzeptionen von Eigentum, die ebenfalls eine lange Tradition aufweisen und mit einem relationalen -nicht atomistischen -Grundverständnis von Gesellschaft einhergehen (Degens 2021 (Bosselmann 2011: 37). Ein Meilenstein in dieser Entwicklung ist der sogenannte »Nassauskiesungsbeschluss« des Bundesverfassungsgerichts aus dem Jahr 1981 (Auer 2014: 138-142).…”

What If the Black Forest Owned Itself? A Constitutional Property Law Perspective on Rights of Nature

“…States have circumscribed or removed the powers of owners over their property through limitations and expropriation in the public interest. 26 The public interest includes environmental protection, 27 even though environmental regulation proves insufficient to protect nature.…”

Constitutional protections of property and energy-efficient housing in Croatia

“…The fundamental source of EU energy efficiency law is the Energy Efficiency Directive 2 along with supplementary secondary legislation, including the Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings, 3 the Ecodesign Directive, 4 and the Energy Labelling Directive. 5 Tackling the problem of efficient use of energy, as one of the main tools for fighting climate change under the Kyoto Protocol, is notoriously associated with energy-inefficient buildings. It has been repeatedly reiterated that buildings account for 40% of the total energy consumption in the EU 6 and that targeting the building sector is needed to reduce the EU's energy dependency and greenhouse gas emissions.…”