This article rethinks the doctrines of responsibility and protection in international environmental law in light of notions of response-abilities and care in more-than-human worlds. Inspired by the intersecting strands of new materialist, relational and posthuman literatures, and informed by critiques of them by decolonial, indigenous and black scholars, the analysis works with onto-epistemologies of becoming that posit an inseparability of being, knowing and acting with(in) the Anthropocene/s. Through the notion of response-abilities of care, the article reconfigures how the destructive and the restorative relations between humans and nonhumans could be construed beyond a narrow understanding of state sovereignty, territorial jurisdiction, liberal human-centred notions of individuated agency and the strict causal nexus between victim and perpetrator. The analysis concludes by reflecting on how law could remain open to emergent, unfolding and contingent potentialities of entangled human-nonhuman relations, and questions law’s capacity to recognize and respond to the agency and alterity of nonhumans. These configurations exceed the schema of responsibility and protection that organizes even international environmental law’s most progressive theories and practices, such as granting ‘rights to nature’.
The 'environment' is a substantively indeterminate concept that has borne different meanings throughout time and translated different visions of the (legal) relationship between Man and Nature. Over the past centuries, the normative concern for environmental protection emanated from distinct legal, cultural and socioeconomic narratives. In providing a genealogy of these multiple and overlapping frames, this article not only sharpens our historical understanding of the legal nexus between two proliferating regimes in international law (environmental law and human rights law), but also critically engages with how environmental protection was progressively translated as an anthropocentric conceptual and operational legal framework. Like Narcissus, humans have been obnibulated by their own interests when thinking about environmental protection. The anthropocentric focus has led environmental law to gradually align and intertwine with human rights, resulting in a synergistic conceptualization of their interactions. Through this prism, environmental protection automatically reinforces human rights. This synergistic mantra has allowed environmental protection to gain momentum by associating it with a grander moral scheme. The focus on synergies, however, overshadowed the existence of conflicts inherent to the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.
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