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The Anthropocentric Ontology of International Environmental Law and the Sustainable Development Goals: Towards an Ecocentric Rule of Law in the Anthropocene
... capitalism). Accordingly, the law has been unable to prevent the human impacts that have forced Earth into a new geological epoch, termed the 'Anthropocene' (French and Kotze, 2018). However, the Anthropocene discourse has been criticized by several scholars for implying that humanity as a whole is universally and evenly responsible for the ecological damage inflicted on the Earth (see Moore, 2017;Arons, 2023). ...
... Despite attempts to address environmental degradation, global environmental law and governance is conceptually and structurally rooted in dominant anthropocentric thinking that permits ecocidal tendencies. Several scholars have therefore called for a transition towards eco-centric models of regulation to promote a paradigm shift from human-centered perspectives to Earth-centered perspectives (see Abate, 2019;Mylius, 2013;De Lucia, 2015;French and Kotze, 2018). Etymologically derived from 'Earth as center', eco-centrism seeks to embed humankind within, rather than outside and above, Nature. ...
Global environmental law is characterized by Eurocentric cultural paradigms that perceive humanity as external and superior to Nature. This supremacy over Nature reflects a legacy of Western colonial domination. Accordingly, environmental regulations have been complicit in sustaining the paradigms that have given rise to the Anthropocene. It is against this backdrop that this article seeks to investigate how global environmental law could engage in transformative reform by embracing Southern epistemologies, particularly through the legal subjectivisation of Nature, i.e. by conceptualizing Nature as subjects of rights. Rooted in Indigenous worldviews, the emerging Rights of Nature movement provides a critical opportunity to re-envision global environmental law through historically colonized and marginalized forms of knowledge. In particular, this article explores the instrumentality of litigation to act as a catalyst for diffusing Southern conceptions in Eurocentric legal cultures to decolonize international law. This article specifically analyzes the animal rights dimension of the broader the Rights of Nature paradigm. It argues that the recent wave of litigation awarding rights to animals - primarily in the Global South - reflects an evolving inter-judicial dialogue between domestic judges, whose interactions could potentially feed into a cosmopolitan global jurisprudence for animal rights in a bottom-up manner, which captures the plurality of ways of understanding and conceptualizing Nature.
... The SDGs themselves are political goals, not juridical norms (Kotzé & French, 2018) , still, the substance that the SDGs reflect is international custom (some of which is). The SDGs and targets are, therefore, adequately conceptualised as a subset of existing intergovernmental dedications. ...
... While such accounts evince the dedication of states to support the developmental agenda of development, it also designates the corresponding pressure that nations accredit to international (environmental) law tools to accomplish the goals of globally agreed agendas. This is an essential recognition at the state and global environmental political level, considering it unlocks the opportunity to align environmental laws with the development goals and potentially assure the SDGs' fulfilment through laws and vice versa (Kotzé & French, 2018) . ...
Humanity is on the verge of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development deadline. The tension between environmental and corporate-developmental interests has been a focal part of the law- and policy-making processes. These instruments reveal that the sustainable development agenda in the business and environmental sector has not been straightforward to accomplish. The balance, nonetheless, appears to bend in favor of securing the environment. This paper investigates how the “well-established” SDGs have matured as the nexus and affect the augmentation of the national corporate and environmental laws. In that respect, this work has delineated SDGs as a nexus for legislative improvement, proposed the possibility for mutuality with national corporate and environmental laws, and outlined the challenges impeding the purposeful implementation of SDGs. The purposes of this research are identifying the nexus between the SDGs and enterprise sustainability, to unravel the possibility for mutualism, and understanding the challenges hindering the implementation of SGDs in enterprises’ activities. The normative juridical legal research was administered for this research, with a literature study approach to compile scientific literacy from within and outside the country. The analysis is conducted qualitatively. This study establishes and ascertains that the SDGs are the ultimate nexus for business-environmental sustainability that can be accustomed to the local wisdom of each nation, notwithstanding it is universal in nature. The mutuality within the SGDs and business-environmental law can also be accomplished, and there is urgent merit to surmount the challenges that have been outlined in this paper.
... One of the larger issues is that the SDGs seem oblivious to the interests of the environment, habitats, biodiversity, and nonhuman lives outside of their functional importance to humans (Kotzé & French, 2018;Kopnina, 2020;Visseren-Hamakers, 2020;Torpman & Röcklinsberg, 2021). Even though the concept of "purposeful profit," an aim of reshaping businesses as essential contributors to solving the global challenges of the twenty-first century, has been recently popularized by the British Academy (www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publica tions/future-of-the-corporation-principles-for-purposeful-business/), little of it addresses the intrinsic value of nature. ...
... In general, the environmental category in sustainable banking focuses on the eight basic pillars of environmental maintenance, environmental development, benefiting the environment, supporting organic agriculture, supporting environmental businesses, promoting renewable energy, supporting environment-friendly activities, and preserving environmental resources. From an environmental perspective, unreliable legal settings tend to be lax in environmental regulations (Kotzé & French, 2018). This relegates environmental stewardship to voluntary programs, which may slow progress toward curbing emissions and disproportionately harm disadvantaged classes (Markkanen & Anger-Kraavi, 2019) and exacerbate inequality (Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019). ...
... The anthropocentric focus of the report and its incarnations on meeting human needs through social development and economic growth has been highlighted by Reed (1995), Mitchell (1997), Svirezhev and Svirejeva-Hopkins (1998), Fath (2015), Brandi (2015), Kopnina (2016Kopnina ( , 2020, Strang (2017), Adelman (2018), Keitsch (2018), Kotzé and French (2018), Torpman and Röcklinsberg (2021), and Bonnedahl et al. (2022) for example. This was confirmed quantitatively by Phillips (2021) through the application of the Geocybernetic Assessment Matrix (GAM) to the SDGs and their targets. ...
The Brundtland report has significantly influenced and guided sustainable development since its publication. There is abundant literature on how and to what degree the report and its incarnations (e.g. Agenda 21, Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals) have been implemented at all spatial and governance scales. However, there is lesser literature on a quantitative determination and evaluation of the sustainability outcomes of implementing the report at a specified spatial–temporal scale. Therefore, this paper seeks to contribute towards remedying this, by determining and evaluating the indicated levels, nature, and dynamics of sustainability of the UK, for the period 2000–2018 from a Brundtland perspective. This is achieved by the application of the Sustainability Dynamics Framework to the results of the Sustainable Society Index. The results indicate that the sustainability of the UK improved from very weak to weak sustainability over the period. This was due to improvements in energy-related indicators which had a significant positive influence and impact upon sustainability outcomes. However, both the indicators of Population Growth and Public Debt were indicated as having a significant negative influence and impact upon the obtained levels and nature of sustainability. Furthermore, the Consumption indicator levels also had a significant detrimental influence upon the other indicators and sustainability over the period. The dynamics of sustainability occurring in the UK indicates the development of a more disturbed cycle of impacts upon the nature of the environment–human system and relationship. Therefore, unless corrective measures are taken through a fundamental transformational shift, then there is the realistic possibility of a systemic crisis occurring.
... The victims of unsustainability: a challenge to sustainable development goals, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology. Kotze, L., y, French, D. (2018 39. Algunos investigadores se refieren a la Criminología Global del Sur, donde atendiendo a la dinámica y contexto del sur del planeta, se pone de manifiesto una discriminación ecológica entre los dos hemisferios del planeta. ...
Las presiones antrópicas que soporta el planeta han llegado a un punto que algunos estudios califican como de no retorno, poniendo en peligro la salud planetaria. Frente a esta situación es necesario analizar cómo el daño ecológico generado por la especie humana está incrementando las injusticias a nivel global y cómo impacta sobre las posibles víctimas. El avance de la tecnología y las actividades generan nuevos riesgos vinculados a un modelo capitalista que fomenta la desigualdad a la vez que propicia un aumento de la presión sobre la propia naturaleza. Esto genera situaciones de riesgo que pueden representar amenazas para el planeta y todas las especies que residen en el mismo. Por ello, se han incluido en las Estrategias de Seguridad Nacional. Con esta perspectiva es necesario analizar estos daños generados a través de los límites que puede soportar el sistema Tierra, Gaia, y se realiza desde la ecocriminología para profundizar en aquellas amenazas que pueden ser cuantificadas y suponer un problema. Asimismo, se plantea dentro de esta perspectiva el impacto directo e indirecto que pueden sufrir las diferentes especies que residen en Gaia, además de los ecosistemas. Dentro de estas amenazas se analiza una de ellas de forma específica, pues nos centramos en el cambio climático como uno de los límites planetarios que han sido sobrepasados y que ha tenido que ser incorporado en la Estrategia de Seguridad Nacional. Palabras clave: seguridad integral, cambio climático, límites planetarios, salud planetaria.
... Short-termist, linear and corporate-driven development politics form the foundation of the current global environmental governance order and are apparent in, for example, the unambitious and path-dependent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that have an astonishingly limited short-term time horizon of only 15 years until 2030 (Kotzé and French 2018). A recently published mid-term assessment of the political impacts of the SDGs suggests that they have been unable to ensure planetary integrity in ways that also fully address interand intra-generational multispecies injustices . ...
After decades of ineffective state-led global climate governance that has been dominated by mostly short-term Northern political and corporate interests, we are now witnessing an increased recognition of the planetary scale of the climate crisis and its impacts on present and future life on Earth. The Anthropocene is argued to be the new geological epoch and is associated with fast-approaching planetary boundaries and a new understanding of promethean humans as a powerful geological force. The Anthropocene introduces a new context for thinking about the climate crisis and its associated multiple patterns of differentially distributed injustices, including the temporal aspects of justice. At the same time, the climate crisis prompts the need to embark on new strategies to ensure a safe and just operating space for all present and future generations within planetary limits. While traditionally marginalized in national, regional and United Nations political fora, and largely ignored by the high rhetoric of multilateral environmental agreements that have been unable to operationalize intergenerational justice in day-to-day governance, young people are now actively claiming their position as representatives of present and future generations. They do so through protests, but also increasingly through more formal avenues to deliberately assert claims for intergenerational justice. One increasingly popular and often successful strategy is climate litigation. In this paper, we explore the shift in understanding and the practicing of intergenerational justice in the deep time context of the Anthropocene, and how young people are becoming more powerful political actors that use climate litigation to ensure intergenerational justice. We briefly reflect on the 2021 decision of the German Constitutional Court in Neubauer et al versus Germany as an example of successful youth-led climate litigation.
... It focuses on the interactions of people with the environment in complex urban systems, with health resulting as an emergent systemic property. While both plans have applied systems thinking, the difference between the previous and the new approaches lies in the recognition that in the age of the Anthropocene, a less anthropocentric and more ecocentric view becomes necessary (Küpers, 2020;Kotzé and French, 2018). ...
Cities of the future will need to cope with the triple challenges of urban growth, planetary boundaries leading to reduced energy and other resources, and rapid climate change. In response to the challenges of these complexities, urban growth and innovations in networked infrastructure development need to go hand-in-hand to transform urban systems and sustain the urban health advantage. In order to achieve this, knowledge and policy-making need to undergo processes of accelerated learning. The International Science Council’s global science programme “Urban Health and Wellbeing: A Systems Approach” has formulated goals to meet the urban health challenges of future cities.
... The focus on the humanitarian dimension of environmental damage is emblematic of the prevailing anthropocentric ontology shaping international law that relegates nonhuman life to a purely utilitarian function. 148 The proposed crime of ecocide casts environmental damage as a problem that results in both humanitarian and ecological consequences. The crime proposes that liability should be imposed in cases where 'the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s)', 149 severely diminishes the peaceful enjoyment of such ecosystem(s) by inhabitants within the territory where the ecosystem is located or in another territory. ...
The proposal to include ecocide as the fifth crime in the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court (‘Rome Statute’) is part of ongoing efforts by jurists aimed at enhancing
environmental protection through international criminal law. If adopted, the crime would be the first standalone environmental crime under the Rome Statute. Its proponents view it as a powerful liability norm for dealing with the humanitarian, ecological and structural aspects of environmental damage that together threaten international peace and security. Its accommodation into the Rome Statute would necessitate changes to the substantive provisions of the Statute. In light of the controversial change, this article raises questions about its feasibility as a criminal liability norm and concludes that the crime of ecocide represents an appropriate legal response to environmental damage. This argument is anchored on the ecological integrity framework understood as a grundnorm for international law.
... Discussing approaches to global governance, Kotzé and French pointed out that international environmental law has been confronting emerging global environmental issues in an innovative way. At the same time, they also pointed out that international environmental law not only regulates global environmental protection issues, but also puts forward new requirements for industries related to environmental protection [8]. Humby believed that treaties or specialized judicial bodies have the advantage of addressing fragmentation and inconsistency in international environmental law, which can fill gaps in international environmental law. ...
International environmental law is the basic charter for dealing with international environmental issues, and it plays an important role in international environmental governance. In recent years, China’s economy has achieved great development, but environmental problems are also very prominent. International environmental law provides a basic reference for China’s environmental governance, but it also brings challenges to the development of China’s environmental productivity to a certain extent. At the same time, due to the unique dominant position of international environmental law, it has played a certain restrictive role in the development of China’s environmental productivity. Based on this, in order to promote the sustainable development of China’s economy, this paper took China’s industrial and agricultural development as the research object. This paper has conducted research on China’s industrial and agricultural environmental productivity, aiming to explore the role of international environmental law in China’s environmental productivity. The article first analyzed the limitation of international environmental law on China’s environmental productivity, and then on this basis, the article conducted a numerical simulation of China’s industrial and agricultural environmental productivity. Finally, starting from the actual development situation, the paper aimed to find out the numerical deviation of China’s environmental productivity changes through quantitative analysis. In the course of the research on environmental productivity development, the article found a strong correlation between environmental productivity and international environmental law in China. The correlation between environmental productivity and international environmental law reaches 59.93% in South China and 61.02% in North China. Also, after a series of comparative analyses, the article finds that changes in climate characteristics can exacerbate the regulation of China by international environmental law and seriously affect China’s economic development. In this case, China’s economy declined by 2.6% year-on-year, which further pushed China to practice sustainable development strategies. This shows that it is essential to study the relationship between international environmental law and China’s environmental productivity.
... As examined earlier, there is no consensus over interactions between goals in the SDGs. Such a loose structure between the SDGs, whilst In this way, the current structure of the SDGs continues to embrace economic growth for all nationsnot only those that are developing but also those that are developedwithout taking serious account of economic conditions compatible with social and environmental goals (Gasper, 2019;Stewart, 2015), and thus endorsing unlimited growth (Kotzé & French, 2018). This permits continuous overproduction and overconsumption rather than any reduction in the name of resource efficiency (Crabtree & Gasper, 2020;Gasper et al., 2019;Kopnina, 2019); it also endorses the unequal distribution of income and wealth rather than narrowing the gap in the name of inclusive growth (Gupta & Veglin, 2016;Kopnina, 2019;Fukuda-Parr, 2019, Hickel, 2019. ...
The evolution of the development discourse is profoundly political. Despite a range of innovations the situation remains much the same, and has led over time to the dominance of the economic growth model. Whilst academic/ideological vigour, policy relevance and institutional support, together with intellectual independence, are essential; too radical an alternative approach would be dismissed by mainstream opinion, either by design or neglect. To survive and to remain influential, any alternative requires the mainstream to engage with it for political feasibility. The development discourse has thus evolved through a delicate balancing act, acknowledging a need for a cautiously optimistic outlook. By tracing changes in two approaches to development (basic needs and human development) and in two global development goals (millennium development goals and sustainable development goals) through their selection and use of indicators, this article explores both the explicit and the implicit power of the mainstream in the past and present alternatives.
... From an environmental perspective, unreliable legal settings tend to be lax in environmental regulations (Kotzé & French, 2018). This relegates environmental stewardship to voluntary programs, which may slow progress toward curbing emissions and disproportionately harm disadvantaged classes (Markkanen & Anger-Kraavi, 2019) and exacerbate inequality (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019;UN, 2020). ...
The role of the financial sector is central in reducing income inequality – the goal of SDG 10 – by facilitating economic opportunities. However, institutional weaknesses may also undermine this effect. We argue that sustainable banking generates bidirectional trust to overcome institutional weaknesses, particularly the weak rule of law. Empirical evidence from 46 countries aggregating data of 1060 banks over 2010–2017 shows that sustainable banking lessens income inequality in weak rule of law settings. The results are robust after including the effects of bank digitalisation. This study has important implications for sustainable banking expansion into weak institutional environments and demonstrates banks’ efforts in their commitment to reducing inequality.
... Currently, the scope of sustainable development is formulated by the sustainable development goals (SDGs) agenda. Some authors regret that this agenda adopted an anthropocentric perspective [42,43], although some goals already have some ecocentric perspectives. The SDGs propose the implementation of sustainable practices via a governance model based on goal setting [44], which is revolutionary compared to the hard law regulation tradition that has not been able to protect ecosystems. ...
This article is written around the time a Dutch court ordered the corporate group Shell to cut its carbon emissions by 2030. The aim of the article is to contribute to the conceptualisation of the phenomenon this judgement unveils in terms of greening human rights litigation supported by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). It addresses, firstly, how claiming the protection of the Earth before courts is occurring in a highly fragmented legal, economic and social context as a way to overcome the multiple obstacles flagged by the literature on the UNGPs. Secondly, it assesses how human rights litigation seeking global justice has evolved in waves with common trends, such as activism from social actors and courts that rely on arguments based on progressive soft law. Thirdly, it identifies two trends in the current wave of green litigation: the anthropocentric perspective that claims the protection of the Earth in the public interest and the ecocentric perspective that claims autonomous rights for Mother Earth. Finally, the article flags some gaps in this third wave of human rights litigation, particularly the risk of disregarding the third pillar of the UNGPs: access to an effective remedy for marginalised communities that are not aware of these ongoing developments.
... However, beyond this frenzy lies a glaring problem, that the SDGs promote an agenda based on the strongly contested concept of sustainable development (Williams and Millington 2004, Hopwood et al. 2005, Dernbach and Cheever 2015, Washington 2015, that supports the status quo and the "unambitious sustainable development' path", addressing the symptoms but not the underlying causes of the most pressing challenges they aim to address (Kotzé 2019, p. 224). Despite being presented as "a comprehensive, far-reaching and people-centred set of universal and transformative goals of critical importance to humanity, other species and the planet" (UNGA 2015), the SDGs are riven with tensions and designed in a manner that do not promote the deep societal transformations needed to avert ecological catastrophe (Kotzé and French 2018). ...
In 2015, the UN adopted the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of universal goals in key areas of action linked to sustainable development. The SDGs address not only highly relevant socioeconomic issues, but also pressing environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene, such as climate change. The integration of a specific climate goal – SDG 13 – into the SDGs is paramount as climate change is a global and urgent threat compromising the realisation of all the SDGs. However, the SDGs’ focus on issues linked to the current economic growth pattern and development paradigm may prevent them from addressing the climate crisis and the inequalities and injustices associated with it. This paper attempts to establish the extent to which the SDGs promote progress towards achieving climate justice or if, on the contrary, they maintain the status-quo and continue to fuel the climate crisis while leaving millions behind.
... Indeed: when it comes to law's relationship with (and mediation of) the lifeworld of the planet and its non-human denizens, it is intensely problematic that the human subject stands at the centre of the juridical order as its only true agent and beneficiary. (Grear 2015, p. 225) The anthropocentrism of law is perhaps nowhere clearer than in provisions of IEL (Gillespie 2014 and more recently Kotzé and French 2018). The ethically deficient anthropocentrism of IEL is a root cause of the Anthropocene's socio-ecological crisis and of its injustices, and a main reason for IEL's inability to effectively address these. ...
In this paper, we focus on the structural complicity of international environmental law (IEL) in causing and exacerbating climate injustices. We aim to show that although the intentions behind IEL may be well-meaning, it often inadvertently, but also deliberately at times, plays a role in creating, sustaining and exacerbating the many paradigms that drive climate injustice in the Anthropocene. We focus on three aspects: IEL’s neoliberal anthropocentrism; its entanglement with (neo)colonialism; and its entrenchment of the sovereign right to exploit energy resources. We conclude with a call for thoroughgoing, and urgent, reform of IEL. En este artículo, nos centramos en la complicidad estructural del derecho ambiental internacional (DAI) en el origen y la exacerbación de injusticias climáticas. Pretendemos mostrar que, pese a que las intenciones detrás del DAI puedan ser buenas, frecuentemente de forma inadvertida, pero a veces también deliberadamente, desempeña un papel en el origen, el mantenimiento y el agravamiento de muchos paradigmas que dirigen la injusticia climática en el Antropoceno. Nos centramos en tres aspectos: el antropocentrismo neoliberal del DAI; su implicación con el (neo)colonialismo; y su reforzamiento del derecho soberano a explotar recursos energéticos. Concluimos con una llamada a una reforma integral y urgente del DAI.
... It is, therefore, surprising that many researchers and practitioners embrace the idea of teaching for sustainable development, ESD, and ESDG. Scholars have warned that as long as social and economic priorities are being taught at the expense of environmental awareness, sustainability remains no more than a slogan (Bonnett 2013(Bonnett , 2015 To sum up, the most common application for sustainable development, as "balancing" triple objectives and the SDGs, is not only anthropocentric (Adelman 2018;Kotzé and French 2018), but also counterproductive in educating future planetary citizens. In its designation as "quality education", the ESDG might negate environmental sustainability. ...
Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace Education for Sustainable Development and Education for Sustainable Development Goals, critical scholars have pointed out that the very enterprise of sustainable development is not without its contradictions. Therefore, any education that engages with sustainable development needs to be carefully reviewed, rather than supported, in its ambition to promote the supposedly universally desirable aims. The rhetoric of sustainable development as meeting the needs of present and future generations is largely anthropocentric in failing to take nonhuman species into account when setting up pragmatic and ethical objectives. Similarly to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that have helped to raise living standards across the world, but have largely failed to address environmental sustainability challenges, the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) tend to prioritize “inclusive economic growth” at the expense of ecological integrity, which is very likely to negatively affect not only nonhuman species but also future generations and their quality of life. Thus, as this chapter will argue, universally applicable Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDGs) is problematic in the context of addressing the long-term sustainability for both human and nonhuman inhabitants of the planet. Given escalating climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and depletion of natural resources, this chapter questions whether ESDGs can qualify as a desirable “quality education”. The paradoxes of sustainable development and ways forward that seem a better alternative for ESDG include indigenous/traditional learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, and education for degrowth, steady-state, and Cradle-to-Cradle and circular economy. Advantages of universal education are also highlighted, as any education that supports basic literacy, numeracy, and values attributed to the intrinsic rights of humans and nonhumans can help students to be equipped to deal with social and environmental challenges.
... Moreover, their relationship, while said to be integrated and coherent, is indicative of various tensions. First comes People, such that anthropocentrism arguably remains central to a sustainability agenda (Adelman, 2017;Kotze and French, 2018). As discussed in Chapter 1, this is not a notable departure from past international (and European) instruments relating to sustainability. ...
... Consequently, it might seem reasonable to argue for an overcoming of anthropocentrism as a first step towards liberating sustainability from the chains of modern capitalism. Many international environmental lawyers indeed push for sustainability to become more ecocentric (Gillespie, 2014;Bosselmann, 2016;Kotze and French, 2018). ...
... By contrast, ESDG unreflexively aims to encourage learners to take "actions for sustainable development" (UNESCO, 2017). The SDGs move away from the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) concerns to the naive belief in the capacity of successful management of natural resources (Kopnina, 2016c, Adelman, 2018Kotzé & French, 2018). ...
Building on the Millennium Development Goals, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) were established. Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace the SDGs, given escalating sustainability challenges, this article questions whether ESDG is desirable as “an education for the future”. Many challenges outlined by the SDGs are supposed to be solved by “inclusive” or “sustainable” economic growth, assuming that economic growth can be conveniently decoupled from resource consumption. Yet, the current hegemony of the sustainability-through-growth paradigm has actually increased inequalities and pressure on natural resources, exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change and resulting social tensions. With unreflective support for growth, far from challenging the status quo, the SDGs and consequently, the ESDGs, condone continuing environmental exploitation, depriving millions of species of their right to flourish, and impoverishing future generations. This article creates greater awareness of the paradoxes of sustainable development and encourages teaching for sustainability through various examples of alternative education that emphasizes planetary ethic and degrowth. The alternatives include Indigenous learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, education for steady-state and circular economy, empowerment and liberation.
... According to Van der Waldt and Auriacombe [8] and Kotzé and French [65] the global discourse on urban management, governance and resilience is often characterized by the quest for the universal principles of good urban governance. It is evident that there is general consensus about the fundamental principles thereof. ...
Good urban governance is a multidimensional concept that focuses on the improvement of the quality of living conditions of local citizens, especially those of marginalised and disadvantaged communities. Cities face various adversities and challenges, such as unsustainable use of natural resources, lack of housing and infrastructure, the prevalence of poverty, rapid urbanisation, crime, disasters and effects of climate change. City resilience is an inclusive process that refers to a city’s ability to sustainably manage unexpected and expected risk-related events. In addition, it includes a city’s capacity to adapt to future challenges from a strategic and spatial perspective. This paper aims to analyze the nature of sustainable development in general. More specifically, it sets out to analyze the importance of urban governance in Africa and the interrelationship of good urban governance and city resilience. The purpose is to provide a theoretical underpinning and a practical orientation for the role that urban governance could play in sustainable development. The methodology is based on a document analysis by way of an intensive literature study. The qualitative description of the findings focused on the themes that emerged from the research and the manner in which they were conceptualised. It was established that while African countries have experienced certain successes, there have been many challenges as far as ‘good’ and ‘sustainable’ urban governance is concerned. Results indicated that the notion of ‘good urban governance’ is a prerequisite for African countries to design and execute sustainable development initiatives successfully.
... More radically, it has been described as serving to obscure, and thereby prevent the resolution of, a 'latent collision course' between the pillars it purports to harmonise (Stone 1994, p 977). More recent critiques of the SDGs have noted that they seem to endorse a narrative that environmental and social benefits are consequences of economic growth (Kotzé and French 2018). ...
The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed to ‘transform our world’. Yet critics argue that the concept of sustainable development serves to maintain an unsustainable status quo, or provide a positive gloss on a terminal conflict between its ‘pillars’: environmental protection, economic growth and social welfare. In this article, we examine this tension with respect to the implementation of SDG 12 in the European Union. SDG 12 calls for responsible consumption and production, which necessitates reconciling, or ‘decoupling’, economic growth and environmental degradation: the core of sustainable development. Initial examination reveals that the largest implementation gap is among high-consuming countries, including those of the EU, the focus of our article, who are failing to account for transboundary impacts of products consumed domestically. This shortcoming, facilitated by the flexibility of the SDG ‘global target, national action’ approach, undermines the achievement of other environmental SDGs relating to biodiversity and climate, among others. Yet, as compared to other EU approaches to addressing transboundary environmental harm from trade in existing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), which we examine, the global focus and breadth of SDG 12 offers transformative potential. Ultimately, even if the three pillars of sustainable development are not ‘rebalanced’ toward environmental conservation, they can provide a construct for examining interactions and trade-offs between goals. Simply taking account of transboundary consumption, as SDG 12 indicators call for, would encourage more effective cooperation to help producing countries address environmental problems that result from production for export through impact assessment and enforcement.
En los últimos años se están manifestando distintos síntomas que apuntan a la existencia de una crisis del orden internacional. Sin embargo, las primeras muestras de este fenómeno se remontan tiempo más atrás y ponen a Occidente cara a cara con sus contradicciones. No obstante, no es sino ahora cuando nos hallamos ante una posible impugnación del orden internacional existente, que puede dar lugar a un cambio de modelo imprevisible. En este trabajo se analizan diferentes elementos clave de esta reformulación que afecta a la concepción contemporánea del Derecho Internacional de manera que se pueden apreciar tendencias de un incipiente repliegue normativo.
Aquatic ecosystem conservation is imperative to reaching global biodiversity and sustainability targets. However, the ecological status of waters has been continuously eroded through mismanagement in the face of existing and emerging anthropogenic stressors, such as pollutants. There has been an emerging trend towards the use of dyes to manage algae and plants as well as to alter aesthetics within various aquatic environments. This artificial colouring has potential ecological implications through reductions in light levels and disruptions to thermoclines (i.e., temperature regime changes with depth). Abiotic regime shifts could in turn drive ecological cascades by depowering primary production, hampering top-down trophic interactions, and affecting evolved animal behaviours. Despite commercial dyes being marketed as acutely non-toxic, very little is known about the chronic effects of these dyes across ecological scales and contexts. We thus call for greater research efforts to understand the ecological consequences of dye usage in aquatic environments, as well as the socio-cultural drivers for its application. This emerging research area could harness approaches such as biological assays, community module experiments, remote sensing, culturomics, and social surveys to elucidate dye effects, trends, and perspectives under a pollution framework. A greater understanding of the potential effects of dye in aquatic ecosystems under relevant contexts would help to inform management decisions and regulation options, while helping to mediate ecocentric and anthropocentric perspectives.
The Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, launched during the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022, encourages governments, companies and investors to publish data on their nature‐related risks, dependencies and impacts. These disclosures are intended to drive businesses to recognise, manage and mitigate their reliance on ecosystem goods and services. However, there is a ‘biodiversity blind spot’ that is evident for most organisations and business schools. Business education rarely addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss, such as the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. As the dominant positioning of Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) presents biodiversity in anthropocentric instrumental terms inadequate for addressing ecosystem decline, we posit that a more progressive and transformative ecocentric education through ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy is needed. Both approaches include the development of critical thinking about degrowth, the circular economy and conventional stakeholder theory to include non‐human stakeholders. Using comparative case studies from Northumbria University, the University of Hong Kong and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we illustrate how business education can be transformed to address biodiversity loss, providing theoretical guidance and practical recommendations to academic practitioners and future business leaders.
This study examines, from the perspective of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, whether animals can be considered as subjects of rights and what actions are appropriate to protect their rights. For this purpose, ruling 253-20-JH/22 was examined, also known as the “Monkey Estrellita” case, which was issued within the framework of the review of a habeas corpus action on behalf of a howler monkey. In this regard, the Court recognized that animals are subjects of rights that are safeguarded under the rights of Nature, applying the absolute principles of ecological interpretation and inter-species considerations.
In this chapter we are rethinking sustainability in a non-extractivist perspective. Whilst notions of sustainable development and green growth tend to reproduce dynamics of extractivism and mastery in human-nature relations, we analyze how practices based on care and reciprocity are pivotal to enable sustainable relations. To do so we build on a sociology of absence and emergence perspective studying marginalized practices of regenerative farmers in Denmark and Portugal. We analyze practices of care and reciprocity, how practitioners are organizing to enable these practices, and discuss changes in concepts needed to enable such practices. By doing so we draw attention to the need of redefining human-nature relations as a key challenge and starting point for understanding what sustainable economies might be.
This article surveys critical scholarship that links the literature on sustainable business education and education for sustainable development goals (ESDG). It is assumed that ESDG is desirable in the business curriculum. However, it is argued here that ESDG erroneously fosters the illusion of successfully combining economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection, foregrounding “sustained and inclusive economic growth”, which is often dependent on the increased consumption of natural resources. ESDG rarely addresses industrial expansion that jeopardizes the opportunity for the resolution of environmental crises, ignoring the intrinsic value of nonhuman species and ecosystems and masking the root causes of unsustainability. ESDG places heavy emphasis on economic and social aspects of sustainability, at the cost of the environment. By contrast, some earlier forms of environmental education recognize the limits to growth and emphasize environmental integrity as a foundation for both social and economic activity. This article emphasizes the need to re-orientate ESDG towards genuine sustainability of ecopedagogy in the context of business education, emphasizing transformative business models based on degrowth, circular economy, and steady-state economy. It is argued that a more explicit pedagogical re-orientation towards the recognition of planetary boundaries, as well as toward a less anthropocentric focus is needed.
Apoyado en la propuesta de Jean d’Aspremont, según la cual el derecho internacional es un sistema de creencias, esta investigación va un paso más allá para afirmar que estas no son imparciales, sino que tienen un origen, fundamento y desarrollo marcadamente occidental. Posteriormente, estas creencias son implantadas en el Tercer Mundo mediante campañas de universalización del derecho. A partir de la contextualización de estos procesos de implantación del derecho internacional en Latinoamérica y seguido de la ilustración de algunas creencias fundamentales transmitidas en el campo del derecho internacional de la inversión extranjera, así como del derecho internacional ambiental en la región, esta investigación, basada en una metodología de dogmática jurídica, concluye que tanto las campañas de universalización de dichas creencias como la creciente resistencia a estas, finalmente, fungen de manera conjunta al reforzamiento de las creencias. Esto solo consolida cada vez más que un derecho regional y privado siga siendo nominado como internacional y público. Lo anterior pone de presente la necesidad de promover un derecho internacional incluyente, cuyas creencias tengan un origen diverso, incluidas aquellas provenientes del Tercer Mundo.
Anthropological approaches in international law have been ignored for centuries. The main area of interest is to emphasize indigenous peoples and account for their vulnerabilities in the development of international law. However, shifting from the ideology behind the concept of international law to global law is a crucial debate, for example, global human rights law, global criminal law, global administrative law, global environmental law, global health law, and the law of global governance. This chapter officially considers revitalizing anthropological approaches for rethinking and relearning the international legal spaces. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive understanding of global legal pluralism in terms of the widely accepted current development of global legal thinking and pedagogies. Overall, this chapter provides an introduction to transforming the global concept of justice.KeywordsAnthropological approach in international lawGlobal administrative lawGlobal environmental lawCultural relativism
This chapter engages in a tentative critical-theoretical exploration of ecocide as an ‘ecocentric’ core crime. For this purpose, I first provide a brief outline of the conceptual binary between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. The anthropocentric ontology of international criminal law (ICL) is then explored by retracing its permeation by interrogating two dominant conditions: the international community and the ideal victim. I argue that the contours of a green progress narrative become visible in ICL to remedy the accountability gap concerning large-scale environmental damage. A central thesis of this narrative is that ICL is failing in engagement with environmental damage due to its anthropocentric focus and should therefore move towards a more ecocentric approach by criminalising ecocide. The notion that an ecocentric core crime can redeem ICL’s anthropocentric conditions is problematised in this chapter. Rather than a pointing towards a profound oscillation between environmental ethics and ICL, I contend that this green progress narrative firstly obscures ICL’s anthropocentric ontology and secondly that it does not account for the complexities of translating environmental concerns into the discipline. Latour’s de-centred approach is introduced to disrupt this linear logic and to give impetus for a critical approach of a re-imagination of ICL which embeds the more-than-human in its framework.Keywordsecocideanthropocentrismecocentrisminternational criminal lawcritical legal theory(legal) philosophyLatour
Humanity is on the verge of reaching the planet's boundaries. Industrialisation, the growth of the world population and changing consumption patterns all impact on nature's capacity to regenerate, with global warming, extreme weather, pollution, species depletion, the destruction of ecosystems and the spread of infectious diseases as major threats to our survival. In the view of the Editorial Board of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, these challenges require a (re)calibration of the existing norms for the protection of the environment and more generally an inquiry into international law’s responses to the global environmental crisis. This editorial contribution provides an overview of recent developments across fields of international law and introduces the approaches taken by the various contributions in this volume to the overarching theme. It concludes that international law has in fact become greener over time, but that it is nonetheless essential to go beyond the current efforts by reimagining humanity’s relationship with the environment on a more fundamental level.KeywordsGlobal environmental crisisInternational lawClimate changeBiological diversityHuman rights lawEconomic law
Este artículo hace una crítica a la estructura actual de la gobernanza ambiental internacional. Para ello se examinan tres iniciativas normativas que buscan fortalecer la gobernanza ambiental en relación con los conflictos armados, el derecho internacional penal y el derecho internacional económico. El objetivo es evidenciar que su común denominador es supeditar la protección del medio ambiente al logro de intereses de tipo antropocéntrico. Así, reproducen una mirada instrumental de la naturaleza, cuya protección jurídica no parte del reconocimiento de su importancia intrínseca, sino de la utilidad o el valor que representa para la especie humana. Además, en el artículo se argumenta que este antropocentrismo no es casual, sino una manifestación de la imaginación jurídica contemporánea forjada por la Modernidad capitalista. Por consiguiente, para proveer respuestas adecuadas a la crisis climática y a las crecientes demandas de justicia ambiental, el derecho internacional debe alejarse epistemológicamente del enfoque antropocéntrico que implica entender las relaciones sociedad-naturaleza desde la lógica capitalista de producir valor. Por ello, se propone que, como giro decolonial, el derecho internacional tenga apertura hacia los derechos de la naturaleza y el principio del buen vivir como conceptos que promueven visiones transformadoras de economía política.
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project.
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The article reveals the features of introducing education for sustainable development in Ukraine, its theoretical basis and practical implementation on the example of Secondary Education in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The importance of forming an integrated developing educational environment based on the principles of education for sustainable development is proved. It determines the interdisciplinarity of the content of education for sustainable development, its high potential in creating a new type of educational environment. Methods and approaches of forming the values of sustainable development as important components of the development of life competencies of the individual are revealed.
Environmental education is an increasingly important concern for policymakers and universities, as it is critical to the success of the broader agenda represented by the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving this within the higher education sector has proven difficult, however. This article examines how an interdisciplinary, extra-curricular course on the justice implications of climate change, delivered as part of University College London’s Global Citizenship Programme, combined a range of practical and theoretical methodologies to deliver environmental education and the related concept of education for global citizenship. Evidence indicates that courses such as this could be a powerful means of overcoming the shortcomings in mainstream higher education and equipping students with the skills necessary for them to assist society, at global, national and subnational levels, in transitioning towards more sustainable behaviours.
Through a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches, this book explores the role of international environmental law in protecting and conserving plants.
Underpinning every ecosystem on the planet, plants provide the most basic requirements: food, shelter and clear air. Yet the world’s plants are in trouble; a fifth of all plant species are at risk of extinction, with thousands more in perpetual decline. In a unique study of international environmental law, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and restrictions associated with protecting and conserving plants. Through analysing the relationship between conservation law and conservation practice, the book debates whether the two work symbiotically, or if the law poses more of a hindrance than a help. Further discussion of the law’s response to some of the major threats facing plants, notably climate change, international trade and invasive species, grounds the book in conservation literature. Using case studies on key plant biomes to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the law in practice, the book also includes previously unpublished results of an original empirical study into the correlations between the IUCN Red List and lists of endangered/protected species in international instruments. To conclude, the book looks to the future, considering broader reforms to the law to support the work of conservation practitioners and reshape humanity’s relationships with nature.
The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the field of international environmental law and those interested more broadly in conservation and ecological governance frameworks.
Today, numerous constitutions provide for a rights-based approach to environmental protection. Based as they are on an instrumentalist rationality that seeks to promote human entitlements to nature, the majority of these rights remain anthropocentric. Although there are growing calls within academic and activist circles to reorient rights alongside an ecocentric ontology, only one country to date has taken the bold step to bestow rights on nature in its constitution. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 announces the transition from a juridical anthropocentric orientation to an ecocentric position by recognizing enforceable rights of nature. This article critically reflects on the legal significance of granting rights to nature, with specific reference to Ecuador’s constitutional experiment. It first provides a contextual description of rights in an attempt to illustrate their anthropogenic genesis, and then explores the notion of environmental rights. The following part traces the discourse that has developed over the years in relation to the rights of nature by revealing aspects of an ecocentric counter-narrative. The final part focuses specifically on the Ecuadorian constitutional regime and provides (i) a historical-contextual discussion of the events that led to the adoption of the rights of nature; (ii) an analysis of the constitutional provisions directly and indirectly related to the rights of nature; and (iii) a critical appraisal of whether those provisions, so far, measure up to the rhetoric of constitutional ecocentric rights of nature in that country.
Outlook: The Earth Charter-a model constitution for the world?
- K Bosselmann
K. Bosselmann, 'Outlook: The Earth Charter-a model constitution for the world?', in
K. Bosselmann and R. Engel (eds.), The Earth Charter: A Framework for Global Governance
(Amsterdam: kit, 2010) 239 at 245.