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Nexus governance recognises that sustainability concerns such as water, energy, and food security are interlinked and provides an alternative to fragmented governance. Although it has been applied mostly in the domestic context, the need for nexus governance is also apparent at a planetary scale, as highlighted by interacting planetary boundaries, global telecoupling, and global tipping cascades. However, international environmental law is unable to facilitate what we call ‘planetary nexus governance’. This is mainly because international environmental law lacks an ecological Grundnorm and because its primary rules of conduct remain fragmented in the absence of effective secondary rules on how primary rules should relate to each other. Recognising this challenge, scholars have recently proposed earth system law as a new framework to rethink, in an integrated way, law in an Anthropocene context. Building on this framework, we suggest that international environmental law should adopt a unifying Grundnorm such as planetary integrity. We also suggest that international institutional law, as a body of secondary rules, has an important role to play in facilitating planetary nexus governance by bringing together fragmented bodies of international law. We briefly discuss ways in which international environmental law could reorientate itself to better facilitate planetary nexus governance.

In this article we argue that international environmental law cannot continue to exist in its present form for the purpose of the Anthropocene. We show that analytically, international environmental law and its lawyers are unable to fully understand and respond to the complex governance challenges arising from a complex Earth system. Normatively, international environmental law has failed to provide appropriate norms to prevent humans from encroaching on Earth system limits. In a transformative sense, international environmental law has not been sufficiently ambitious to achieve the type of radical transformations necessary to ensure planetary integrity and socio-ecological justice. We need a new legal paradigm that is better suited for the purpose of the Anthropocene that must address international environmental law’s analytical, normative and transformative concerns. We call this new paradigm earth system law. Building on our recent work, we offer here some preliminary thoughts about what we think the analytical, normative, and transformative dimensions of earth system law could and should entail, and why they would be more appropriate for the purpose of governing a complex Earth system in the Anthropocene.

Scholarship increasingly reveals the distinct interplay between international environmental law and domestic legal systems, and the important role of courts the world over in fleshing out this relationship. Africa, however, seems to be underrepresented in these discussions, despite its being a key stakeholder in the development of international environmental law. As a contribution to this debate, we offer here an analysis of the relationship between international environmental law and domestic African legal systems, by focusing on how domestic courts in Kenya and South Africa have been engaging with the precautionary principle, the principle of public participation and the principle of sustainable development. Our analysis of a range of judgments shows that these courts have been exceptionally innovative in their growing support of these principles that they seem to embrace in their efforts to strengthen domestic environmental protection and to contribute to a nascent transnational judicial dialogue.

This paper argues that international environmental law (iel) is not sufficiently ambitious to confront the Anthropocene’s socio-ecological crisis. The critique specifically focuses on iel’s lack of ambitious and “unmentionable” ecological norms such as rights of nature, Earth system integrity, and ecological sustainability that are not yet considered to be part of the corpus of iel, but that arguably should be in light of the prevailing and ever-deepening socio-ecological crisis. Assuming that the recent Global Pact for the Environment initiative and its accompanying United Nations-mandated report that assesses possible gaps in iel are indicative of the type of reforms we might expect of iel now and in future, the paper determines if and the extent to which the Global Pact initiative embraces ambitious norms and addresses iel’s “unmentionable” normative gaps. A secondary, but related, objective of the paper is to briefly respond to the recent view that any radical critique of the Global Pact initiative is either unfounded, unwarranted or undesirable.

Despite important victories, human rights have been unable to respond effectively to the many deeply intertwined socio-ecological injustices in the Anthropocene. In particular, human rights have failed to practically address, in a meaningful way, the plights of billions of oppressed human beings (and failed to address the vulnerability of non-human beings), while conceptually human rights are proving to be ill-suited for the epistemic demands of the Anthropocene. As a trope, the Anthropocene presents an opportunity to re-interrogate the role of human rights as key mechanisms in the state's regulatory mix to address socio-ecological injustices arising within the context of a vulnerable Earth system. This article reflects upon whether a re-interrogation could be accomplished by utilizing vulnerability theory, which is an alternative approach to ethical evaluation. As a heuristic, vulnerability has the potential to inform an ontological change of stance away from a human-centred, neoliberal, and impregnably Western understanding of human rights, towards an altogether more porous and contingent understanding of the vulnerability of the entire living order as a starting point from which to critique the epistemological closures and regulatory challenges confronting the human rights paradigm in the Anthropocene.

Insights from Earth system science show us that we are crossing over into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Yet, environmental law has failed to integrate these insights and adopt an Earth system perspective, with the result that environmental law has arguably become incapable of responding to the numerous complex, interconnected, and non-linear challenges of an erratic Earth system in the Anthropocene. Earth system law is proposed as a response and is intended to ‘translate’ Earth system science insights into the legal domain, thereby transforming Holocene environmental law and making it more fit for purpose in the Anthropocene. In order to practically explore how this transformation could take place, reliance is placed on the telecoupling framework, which analyses interconnected or coupled human and natural systems over distances. With reference to the mining activities conducted by Canadian companies in Mexico, the telecoupling framework is revealed as a valuable tool for thinking about environmental law in Earth system terms and enabling one to see a range of deeply intertwined telecoupled issues and considerations that must be taken account of by the law. In turn, this enables one to begin to imagine the types of considerations that should be incorporated into legal responses in order to adequately respond to the socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene, Earth system, Earth system governance, Earth system law, Earth system science, Environmental law, Socio-ecological systems, Telecoupling

Juridical protection of the rights of nature is steadily emerging in several legal systems and in public discourse. Building on a recent publication in Transnational Environmental Law in which we interrogated Ecuador’s constitutional experiment with the rights of nature, we critically reflect in this contribution on Bolivia’s legal regime providing for the rights of Mother Earth. We do so, first, by sketching the juridical-political context within which these statutes were drafted and adopted, and then by analyzing the relevant constitutional provisions that provide the basis for the laws of Mother Earth. The third part forms the bulk of the discussion and details the background and the most relevant provisions of Bolivian statutes with a view to enabling a deeper critique in Part 4, in which we critically evaluate both the symbolic and the theoretical significance of the statutes as well as concerns related to their practical implementation. Insofar as the rights of nature paradigm has now become a truly global debate and a consideration in transnational comparative legal borrowing practices, our analysis aims to reveal the Bolivian experience, which could be instructive for civil society groups, academics, politicians and legislatures in a transnational setting.

Review of Comparative and International Environmental Law

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.

Law has failed to address the ever-deepening socio-ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. In the light of, and as a response to, law’s failures in this respect, this paper argues in support of developing a new legal paradigm for the Anthropocene epoch called Earth system law. It does so first by briefly describing the Anthropocene trope and the extent and dimensions of its socio-ecological crisis. The paper then specifically focuses on international environmental law as an example of how and why law has become incapable of, and inappropriate for, addressing this crisis, and for being unable to respond to the Anthropocene’s regulatory demands. By drawing on three Earth system-related regulatory implications of the Anthropocene trope (i.e., inclusivity, interdependencies and complexity), the final part of the paper makes out a case in support of reforming law and creating a new Earth system oriented legal paradigm that is fit for purpose in the Anthropocene epoch.

International environmental law (IEL) has been unable to respond effectively to the Anthropocene’s global socio-ecological crisis, which is critically existential and requires radical interventions and regulatory reform. This article explores the potential of the recent United Nations (UN)-backed initiative to adopt a Global Pact for the Environment as an opportunity to reform IEL. It does so by (i) reflecting on the Anthropocene’s demands for a constitutionalized form of IEL through the lens of global environmental constitutionalism; (ii) investigating the extent to which the Global Pact could contribute to such a vision; and (iii) suggesting ways in which to strengthen the constitutional potential of the Global Pact in this endeavour. To this end, the article revisits the World Charter for Nature of 1982, which seems to have slipped off the radar in academic as well as policy circles. A case is made for renewed support of the Charter – which already enjoys the backing of the majority of UN General Assembly member states, and which has constitutional qualities – to serve as a ‘best-practice’ example during the ensuing negotiation of the Global Pact.

The current global environmental law and governance regime has been designed primarily to attend to the worsening ecological crisis. Evidence, however, suggests that the regime is far from achieving its goal and it is failing in its efforts to solve what people perceive to be pervasive global environmental problems. There is little doubt that this regime is in need of urgent reforms and/or re-situation in a decidedly different paradigm. This article proposes that global constitutionalism, while no panacea, could contribute to these paradigm-shifting reforms by providing a new perspective through which to view the current deficient global environmental law and governance regime and, in real terms, ameliorating some of the deficiencies of the regime through a normative process of constitutionalization.

South Africa is a water-stressed country where scarce water resources are unequally available to South Africans. It seems inevitable that climate change will in future severely affect the availability of water resources and the ecological and socio-economic aspects of water uses in the country. It is especially the poor, indigent and marginalized sectors of the population that have inadequate access to water and it is these people who would also be most severely affected by the impact of climate change on water resources. While South African constitutional and statutory provisions guarantee everyone access to sufficient water, an environmental right and other laws simultaneously aim to protect water resources. There is accordingly a very real possibility for sustainability conflicts to arise where difficult decisions have to be made with respect to providing people access to sufficient water on the one hand and protecting water resources for the benefit of present and future generations on the other. The latter conflict was recently illustrated in the Constitutional Court judgment of Mazibuko v City of Johannesburg 2009 JDR 1030 (CC). For the first time, South Africa’s highest Court was required to provide content to the constitutionally entrenched right of access to sufficient water. Against a general discussion of the state of water resources in South Africa, the predicted impact of climate change on these resources and the prevailing socio-economic conditions in the country, this article analyses the Court’s decision in Mazibuko and argues that its restrictive interpretation of the right to access to water could be considered ecologically responsible and conducive to achieving inter-generational equity.

The 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa explicitly provides for a comprehensive environmental right. The environmental right is part of the supreme law of the country and the entire environmental law regime. South Africa also has a vigilant judiciary, which has had various opportunities to interpret and give meaning to the environmental right. This article explores the manner in which the environmental right has been interpreted, translated and applied by the judiciary over the past 10 years. The article briefly analyses the environmental right, investigates recent judgments that reflected on the right, and concludes with a critical survey and suggestions as to future developments in this regard.