Justus Martin
Thesis title: Whose/Who's Nature: Legal Personhood and Governance of the Environment in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand
Qualifications
MSc Social Anthropology (University of Edinburgh 2024)
(Awarded Best Overall Performance in MSc Social Anthropology (2023/24))
LLB (Hons) Law and Political Science (Northeastern University London 2022)
(Awarded Law Subject Prize 2022)
Research summary
Governance and Management of the Environment
Rights of Nature
Environmental Legal Personhood
Decolonial Legal Thought
Earth Jurisprudence
Indigenous Co-governance
Project activity
Legal personhood and fundamental rights for environmental entities, also known as rights of nature, offer a fledgling answer to one of the most pressing questions about governance today: how can not just humans be governed in a respectful, sustainable, even just manner? Their emancipation of nature’s inherent value and independent interests has made global waves — but what does it mean for nonhumans to be suddenly made participants in the state? How/When does a mountain become a member of legal society? With what/whose knowledge do human representatives govern a mountain who is also an ancestor?
At the crossroads of legal anthropology and environmental humanities, my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, principally aims at better understanding how the legal conceptualisation and political subjectivation of natural entities translates into novel strategies and systems of governance. After legal personhood has become a tool for extending recognition to ancestral other-than-human personalities and transforms ways of governing and managing environments, it is important to follow how this opportunity for implementing value-centric custodianship over ecosystems may build bridges between decolonial thought and practice by enabling Indigenous co-governance and the ways in which this can increase the resilience of socio-ecological communities in the face of environmental changes.