DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe "Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit"
Benno Fladvad
Beschreibung:
Due to anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing integration of agriculture into the world market economy, access to arable and habitable land has become an urgent issue within current transnational debates on environmental (in)justice. In particular, the emerging calls for ‘food sovereignty’ (FS) and ‘migrate with dignity’ (MWD) show how most vulnerable groups from the Global South, i.e. small-scale farmers and inhabitants of small Pacific islands, respond to deteriorating environments by claiming universal and emancipatory rights ‘from below’. These contestations show that the struggle over land is tied not only to the potential loss of physical resources but also to the struggle over cultural and political sovereignty, as well as to the emergence of post-national forms of citizenship. In drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia and Kiribati, where these claims – FS in the former case, MWD in the latter – are currently being negotiated and fought over, this contribution aims to sketch a ‘geography of emerging rights' to make transnational politico-legal responses to environmental injustice visible and understandable. Conceptually, it draws on the assumption that, by now, environmental justice research has paid too little attention to the sphere of 'the legal', and that conversely, legal geography research has been reluctant to analyze dimensions of law and social order within deteriorating environments. This contribution thus discusses analytical entry points from legal geography, legal anthropology, and political theory in order to bring these disciplines into dialogue with empirically grounded research on movements struggling for land and sovereignty.