Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene
(Banner photo by Kees Bastmeijer)
This research community is committed to exploring the challenges of constitutionalization and governance in the Anthropocene era. Their research seeks to re-imagine law’s conceptual foundations for the Anthropocene, articulate them in regulatory modalities that can be legitimate and effectively manage risk, and propose institutional architectures that are capable of responding to and altering the complexities of human interactions with earth systems, which, if left unchecked, will have potentially catastrophic results for future generations.
Introducing the research
Catastrophic environmental degradation is the most urgent global challenge for humanity today. In the era of the Anthropocene, a geological period wherein humans have altered atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes to such a degree, our Holocenenic legal frameworks have proven demonstrably inadequate to manage the risks that it entails.
Indeed, the scale of the changes posed by the Anthropocene are so great that they are destabilizing how we distinguish Nature from culture, global from local, public from private, distinctions that have ordered global human society until now. Distressingly little thought has been given to the legal implications of the transformations that the Anthropocene is demanding of us.
Research questions
The project pursues the following three primary research questions:
- How do the conditions of the Anthropocene affect, conceptually and normatively, the legal subjectivity of nature and future generations within democratic decision-making, and, epistemologically, the political, scientific and legal modes of representation through which the legitimacy and effectiveness of regulatory and legal governance is evaluated?
- Which emergent regulatory technologies constitute legitimate instruments in the Anthropocene, and which accountability frameworks are necessary for managing their effective, yet potentially destructive, capabilities?
- Which governance structures are capable of facilitating reflexive and responsive governance in the Anthropocene, and what new forms of political and legal representation are available in such structures?
Publications & Events
You can find more information about the publications, research output, events and scholars involved in the Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene research community at their dedicated website: https://constitutionalizing-anthropocene.org/.
