Rivers and other natural entities around the world continue to gain legal rights and recognition as living beings. However, it is not always clear how the interests of these natural beings are represented. How can their ‘voices’ be heard?
Rights-off-nature laws are strongly based around place, often centred on specific natural entities. Many countries are experimenting with how that legal recognition should work, and the legal and regulatory frameworks needed to ‘create’ the voice of the natural entity.
The fact that there are so many different kinds of arrangements highlights a major issue for the rights of Nature: there is no clarity on precisely who Nature can be represented by, how it should be represented, or even what the intent of this representation is (or should be).
In a paper published in the international journal PLOS Water, Lidia Cano Pecharroman (MIT) and Blue Community Ambassador Dr Erin O’Donnell (Melbourne Law School) draw on this diversity to examine how rivers as living entities are being represented by, and within, their human communities.
The paper develops a new model of relational representation. At one end of the spectrum is speaking ‘about’ (in which the natural entity has no voice); then there is speaking ‘for’ (in which the natural entity relies on human representatives as trustees or guardians); and finally, there is speaking ‘with’ the natural entity.
Speaking ‘with’ legal persons and/or living entities creates a new relational construction of representation that relies on building relationships of sufficient intimacy with the natural being that it can express its own agency. For example, a river is a dynamic living entity that actively explores and shapes the world around it as it flows. Building the capacity to speak with a natural entity is not easy, and such relationships can take generations to fully develop.
The paper applies this model to understand forms of representation in the Birrarung/Yarra River in Victoria, the Atrato River in Colombia, Mar Menor in Spain, and Te Awa Tupua/Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Cano Pecharroman notes:
“Representing other-than-human entities is not a radical idea per se, as we have long had legal personhood for corporations. However, understanding how these waterways are represented broadens our practical understanding of what representation can be, and allows us to challenge and expand previous notions of representation both for humans and other-than-humans. Our new model of ‘relational representation’ owes its intellectual history to the laws of Indigenous Peoples and the experience of communities that have co-lived with rivers and lakes for generations. Many of these laws emphasise the reciprocal relationship between people and place, and recognise the agency of the natural entity within that relationship.”
O’Donnel says:
“Relational representation operates to end environmental paternalism, in which people make decisions in what they believe are the best interests of the river, and instead we give the river space to be a river. Our paper shows that relational representation changes the way that the voice of the natural entity is heard, and enables dialogue between the natural entity and the wider community. In this way, new, direct, relationships between people and place are made possible.”
This paper was developed during Cano Pecharroman’s time as a visiting scholar at Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment, and benefited from discussion at a workshop on the implementation of rights of nature hosted by UNSW and Melbourne Law School. The new open access paper is available to read or download for free.
Relational representation: Speaking with and not about Nature
