How Environmental Rights Can Contribute to a Better Future

From 4 to 5 December 2025 a conference entitled “Environmental Rights in Multiple Contexts – Stocktaking and Moving Forward” will be held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Organized by Dirk Hanschel and his Max Planck Fellow Group “Environmental Rights in Cultural Context”, the conference is dedicated to the question of how environmental rights can help local communities whose everyday lives are threatened by various types of environmental destruction. The conference is supported by funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.

Environmental Rights in Theory and Practice
“There is a broad global consensus that rights involving the human-nature relationship are of tremendous importance for the future of our planet. The human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, but also rights of nature itself have been incorporated into constitutions, are the subject of cases considered by international courts and tribunals, and also play an increasingly important role in international law,” says Dirk Hanschel, Head of the Max Planck Fellow Group “Environmental Rights in Cultural Context” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. But in spite of the wide recognition of the importance of environmental rights and the intensive discussions in legal literature, there is still limited knowledge about the effectiveness, legitimacy, and application of environmental rights in specific cases on a local level. Hanschel: “In our group we have dedicated ourselves to addressing this gap; employing a combination of legal and anthropological methods, we have carried out field research at sites in countries such as Mongolia, Ethiopia, and Ecuador.”

Diverse Contexts and Diverse Applications
The actual effects of abstract legal norms for tackling local concerns can only be understood by examining the specific cultural context and the economic and power relationships in the community. For example, one project investigates a site in the Mongolian province South Gobi on the border with China, where coal mining has dramatically altered local environmental conditions, in order to understand how this has affected the lives of nomads and settlers and whether environmental rights enshrined in the Mongolian constitution enable them to seek redress. Similarly, another project looks at the consequences of the construction of the Gilgel Gibe III Dam on the Omo River in Ethiopia: Here, too, the research seeks to understand the role of environmental rights as a means for the Dassanech community in the South of the country near Kenya to respond to the dam’s potential impact on their livelihoods and way of life. In Ecuador, by contrast, nature itself has rights embedded in the constitution. To understand how these rights are enforced, the researchers examine the role of the justice system in cases such as a decision of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador to prohibit mining in the cloud forest Los Cedros on the grounds that the ecosystem had a right to protection.

Addressing Environmental Injustice 
Hanschel: “If human rights are a response to fundamental experiences of injustice, we need to ask what concrete experiences people in fact have of environmental destruction and how they cope with them. Anthropological methods have proven immensely valuable for gaining a detailed picture of these experiences. But investigating the rights of nature – that is, the rights of rivers, forests, or entire ecosystems – is more complicated. We can hardly ask nature directly, and asking people about it is not the same thing. But here, too, ethnographic research can provide us with important insights into how such rights are linked with specific ways of life – for example, in indigenous communities in the Amazon.”

Practical Implementation and Nuanced Views Are Crucial 
The research results of the group ““Environmental Rights in Cultural Context” show in detail how the negative effects of environmental damage are expressed at the local level and to what degree the human right to a healthy environment or the rights of nature can be used to address these experiences of injustice. “Environmental rights alone cannot save the world,” concludes Hanschel. “Even when they have been enshrined in the constitution, there is no guarantee that they will be effectively implemented in practice. Furthermore, sometimes people have differing ideas about what is just or unjust. This is why it is so essential to take a nuanced view in which more attention is given to the concrete circumstances of people’s lives and local perspectives. Our research aims to strengthen awareness about these considerations.”