Rights of Nature

About this opportunity

The Rights of Nature project aims to study the evolving law in this field and contribute to the further development of comparative, domestic, international, and transnational law addressing rights of nature through developing common principles, general guidelines and concrete proposals. It will build upon previous academic discourse on sustainable development and natural resources governance.

The purpose of the project is to study and analyse developments in international, transnational and domestic legal systems with regards to evolving forms of nature protection based on ecocentric perspectives. It will focus on analysing the interface between sustainable development and rights of nature, the interface between Indigenous rights and rights of nature and the interface between human rights and rights of nature. In other words, it would engage with the broader framework of Harmony with Nature, as developed since the late 2000s, which emerges from sustainable development, and seeks to address the increasing criticisms laid at anthropocentric environmental protection frameworks. The broader context is that of the climate crisis and anthropogenic climate change. The project will engage with evolving ways of considering environmental protection under the evolving discourse of rights of nature.

The project will work advance knowledge in the field, producing reports which illustrate the state of the art in this field as well as addressing ongoing debates concerning the recognition of rights of nature at the international level. It aims to contribute to the further development of international law addressing rights of nature through developing common principles, general guidelines and concrete proposals that could later be adopted by States as part of a general legal instrument concerning rights of nature.

The supervisor was the New Zealand member of the ILA Committee on the Role of International Law in Sustainable Natural Resource Management for Development (2012-2020), has authored reports for the IUCN Natural Resources Governance Framework, and has published on legal personality and the environment and the public trust doctrine in relation to environmental protection.

The candidate should hold an LLM or MPhil in Law degree (or equivalent) specialising in comparative, international, or transnational aspects of environmental law (with a GPA of 8 or above measured in accordance with the Waikato Grading System).