In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in history to grant constitutional rights to nature. What is termed the indigenous symbol played a significant role in this event. The rights of nature are used as an occasion to interrogate the indigenous symbol in order to reveal what it does, as opposed to what it says. The account of the rights of nature originating in indigenous sensibilities is presented, and subsequently critiqued. The argument makes use of the notion of representative claim (...) to show the strategic construction of indigeneity as ecologically harmonious. An alternative genesis of the rights of nature is presented. It is further showed that the indigenous symbol is employed as a veneer of moral authority hiding the strategic machinations of representative politics. (shrink)

Ecologically-motivated authoritarianism flourished initially during the 1970s but largely disappeared after the decline of socialism in the late-1980s. Today, 'eco- authoritarianism ' is beginning to reassert itself, this time modelled not after the Soviet Union but modern-day China. The new eco-authoritarians denounce central planning but still suggest that governments should be granted powers that free them from subordination to citizens' rights or democratic procedures. I argue that current eco-authoritarian views do not present us with an attractive alternative to market liberal (...) democracy even if we take a highly pessimistic view of our shared prospects under the latter sort of regime. (shrink)

Green economists are clear in their support for localisation, but there is little definitional clarity around the concept of a local economy: how large it would be, or what principles might be used to divide the world into provisioning units. This paper proposes that the 'bioregion' might be a useful concept in designing more local systems of resource supply. The paper is a scoping exercise which starts to explore how the concept of a 'bioregion' might be useful within theoretical economics, (...) outlines key aspects of a bioregional economy, and sketches ideas for a future research agenda. (shrink)

The enduring and consistent rise of the far right has enabled its representatives to affect environmental debates on a larger scale. Although such incursions are often labeled 'eco-fascist', the term itself term may be insufficient to account for the complexity of this intersection. Building upon existing attempts to organise such discourses in a coherent sub-ideological set, 'far-right ecologism' (FRE) is suggested as an overarching term, deriving its morphology from fascism, conservatism, as well as national-populism. Therefore, values emanating from these strands, (...) such as naturalism, spirituality, mysticism, authority, organicism, autarky, nostalgia and Manicheanism, constitute FRE as a heuristic device. (shrink)

This article examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Societies become centres of conspicuous, wasteful consumption. The (...) implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption are examined for clues as to the nature and characteristics of various futures. Special attention is paid to the interdependent system effects of climate change, the peaking of oil and exceptional growth of urban populations. It is argued that the 20th century has left a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possible future scenarios which are briefly described. (shrink)

In the debate around ecological democracy, a pivotal point of contention has long been the question why democracy should actually be expected, as some claim, to deliver (more) ecological outcomes. This point is empirical as well as conceptual: it is difficult to conceive why voters would support any policies that – as is often (perceived to be) the case with environmental legislation – would leave them worse off; whilst democracy conceptually must remain open to all outcomes rather than being tied (...) to any particular agenda ex ante. Yet both empirically and conceptually, the nature and extent of this key puzzle has always hinged on the particular definitions used. This paper reconsiders the link between democracy and ecological sustainability from a cultural angle: I argue that conceiving of both sustainability and democratisation as essentially cultural transformations resolves the puzzle and thus makes a renewed case for ecological democracy. Only as cultural processes – the creation of new meanings of sustainable prosperity in people's everyday lives, and a culturally rather than institutionally based form of democratisation – can these transformations be deep-seated rather than superficial, and thus self-perpetuating rather than merely enforced. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationship between ecological citizenship and the green state and asks whether it is a productive one. First, I examine the political system of an ideal ecological state to assess how it could encourage ecological citizenship. Then, I turn my attention to how eco-states might emerge and be sustained, and the obstacles they may encounter. I show that the green state has a strong potential to develop ecological citizenship, albeit with a rather narrow focus on its (...) deliberative dimension. However, my main point is that this potential may not be fully realised because the green state is grounded on a postliberal ecological democracy and an ecologically modernised economy. Since the green state cannot avoid the problems arising from the nexus between liberal democracy and capitalism, I claim that it is not the most appropriate locus for the cultivation of ecological citizenship. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

The superiority of democracy over other political systems in detecting and responding to ecological problems lies in its capacity for correctiveness. That this correctiveness is not operating well in liberal democracy is a further reason for questioning its identification with democracy. The radical inequality that increasingly thrives in liberal democracy is an indicator not only of the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions, but is (...) also an indicator of their ability to redistribute many ecological ills downwards and to create similar rigidities in dealing with ecological ills. It is therefore not democracy that has failed ecology, but liberal democracy that has failed both democracy and ecology. Ecological denial is structured into liberalism in multiple ways, particularly through its reason/nature dualism, its limitation of democracy, its disposition of public and private spaces, and its marginalisation of collective forms of life. A radical democratic alternative would reshape the public/private distinction to open the way for a public as well as a private ethics of environmental responsibility, for the diffusion of practices of responsibility and care through crucial areas from which liberalism strips them, and for the development of a democratic culture which displaces reason/nature dualism. (shrink)

This paper argues that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as ‘AnthropoScenes’, which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of ‘the Anthropocene’. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and earth system science to more-than-human (...) and object-oriented ontologies, place things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological biopolitical fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socio-ecological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in ‘the AnthropoScenes’ carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political. (shrink)

Theorists of ecological democracy rely heavily upon the deliberative democracy framework for their understanding of what democracy is and what an ecological democracy should be. Existing critiques of this literature focus primarily on whether deliberation can produce green, democratic outcomes. I ask a different question: whether ecological deliberative democrats offer us a democratic theory in the first place. Drawing on the radical democratic theory of Sheldon Wolin, I argue that core features of the extant literature are not democratic at all, (...) and offer a new approach that predicates ecological democracy on demotic formations. (shrink)

The idea of dignity is often taken to be a foundation for principles of justice and democracy. In the West it has numerous formulations and conceptualisations. Within the capabilities approach to justice theorists have expanded the concept of dignity to encompass animals and ecological communities. In this article I rework the idea of dignity to include the Māori philosophical concepts of Mauri, tapu and mana – something I argue is necessary if the capabilities approach is to decolonise in the Aotearoa (...) context. Furthermore, the article links the nation’s recognition of three extensive geographical regions – Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Mt Taranaki – as legal persons to Mātauranga Māori and nonhuman dignity. In doing so, I identify the potential that this understanding of dignity and these legal moves have to decolonise democracy within the settler state. (shrink)