Conference Agenda

The field of futures studies increasingly uses its tools and techniques as an opportunity to push for sustainability transformations. Futures Thinking scholars take an active position towards the various futures that can be, by systematically assessing the probable, the possible and the preferable. The field uses participatory methodologies, in the form of Futures Workshops, that bring people together to reflect on and gain agency over their futures and find common ground.

This search for common ground already dates back to the 1987 United Nations report Our Common Future, which presents ideas for sustainable development by anticipating solutions for “common” concerns of a threatened future. By doing so, however, it presents the idea of sustainable development as the only possible pathway for a sustainable future, cancelling possibilities and imaginaries for what lies beyond its limits.

An emerging stream of literature, however, points to a world of many worlds: the Pluriverse. Contradicting the current hegemonic perspective of sustainable development, it offers a platform for anti-systemic alternatives and different worldviews and practices that are aiming for a socially just world. Scholars of the Pluriverse urge for autonomous design for sustainability and for enabling thought and practice beyond the epistemic limits of modernity.

This paper combines the field of futures studies with the Pluriverse and studies how to improve the anticipation and imagination of Pluriversal Futures. First, it reviews the literature on participatory futures studies and the extent to which it takes multiple worldviews into consideration. Second, it uses two culturally diverse Amazon regions as its case studies: the State of Acre in Brazil and the department of Ucayali in Peru. Based on a qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews it depicts five dissimilar and sometimes conflictual vision-narratives of a safe and just Amazon in 2050.

In its discussion, this study highlights three critical factors for Pluriversal Futures Thinking: 1. Critical reflection on epistemological and ontological differences in Futures Thinking; 2. Supporting the articulation of perspectives of excluded groups and removing barriers to indigenous self-determination; and 3. Working with skilled intercultural facilitators. In conclusion, it argues that consensus and common ground are not an endpoint or necessarily desirable; we need knowledge from struggles between multiple worldviews for thinking about sustainability transformations.

Earth System Governance (ESG) scholars are unanimous in their condemnation of the law’s treatment of non-human nature and their recognition that neglecting the flourishing of planetary ecology as legitimate legal end has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Debate continues, however, on how to think this relationship, split between those who see ecological crisis as a sign that the law must allow the human subject more complete control over their natural object, and those who suggest that the proliferation of human affect through the Earth system has awakened an active natural subjectivity whose rights must be acknowledged under a new natural contract. In this paper, we argue that these perspectives misunderstand the nature of the law, which does not directly create the subject but rather regulates the entire field of anthropogenesis and thus deeply informs the possible futures of a world infused with human labour. By adopting a dialectical approach, we demonstrate that this tension between the natural and human subject can be resolved by understanding the law as operating in both a material and transcendental manner – that is, through physical human acts and on individual human minds. Focusing in particular on the tension between regimes of private property and extraction, on the one hand, as well as land conservation and emissions caps, on the other, we demonstrate that a more fruitful path forward for ESG lies not in resolving, but truly examining, these contradictions within the law so we can rethink not just policy but the very ontological futures that the law enables and incentivises. This paper encourages a move away from coercion, prescription, and judgment, ideas central to traditional jurisprudence, to understanding and a recognition of the constitutive role that law plays in creating the contradictions that in turn shape the way we engage with the world and Earth Systems.

Scholarly interest in the rights of nature, animal rights, and the constitutionalization of environmental protections is proliferating within the Earth system governance community. Simultaneously, attention to planetary boundaries and Earth system processes presents fascinating questions regarding their justice implications-and how interpretations of justice can be framed in human, non-human, and interlinked fashion. Likewise, researchers and practitioners seek to understand how protections of planetary and systemic functions can be effectively operationalized and implemented within existing governance frameworks. While a vibrant and expanding ESG literature documents rights of nature provisions, this project explores a complementary effort to promote nighttime darkness and preserve dark places, given the acknowledged harms from light pollution to ecology (including animals’ migratory patterns and circadian rhythms), economy (including stargazing), and culture. In particular, we evaluate International Dark-Sky certification, a nongovernmental regulatory scheme, and its integration and formal codification in United States jurisdictions. Our preliminary analysis uses qualitative case study, document analysis, and interviews to evaluate: (1) how nonstate dark sky protections have been integrated into formal regulatory provisions in subnational settings, (2) whether the intended benefits of such initiatives are framed in anthropocentric, ecocentric, or interlinked terms, (3) how interpretations of the right to darkness differ by jurisdictional context, and (4) whether evidence exists of exchange among jurisdictions that have adopted dark sky protections and ordinances. The resulting insights support efforts in Earth system governance to examine how environmental norms are interpreted and contested in domestic contexts, how legal provisions and instruments can meaningfully codify protections for Earth system processes, and how jurisdictions can reconcile “rights for nature” and “rights to nature” tensions.

Awarding legal personhood and rights to natural entities, such as certain ecosystems, or the nature as a whole, has been proposed as an answer to the environmental crisis. Making the natural entities “visible in law” as subjects, instead of objects and mere property, might be the path the Western legal systems need to take to transform the exploitative relationship humans have with nonhuman entities to a one fostering harmonious co-existence.

However, the rights of nature (“RoN”) have not always been such a straightforward and easy answer to these problems. Even in countries where RoN have been adopted on a constitutional level, these rights have not always brought only favourable implications to the natural entities. I argue that this is to a large degree due to the underpinnings the concept of rights still has in voluntaristic and liberalistic philosophy.

Liberalistic ideas of the subject of rights as an isolated, self-interested individual that in the “state of nature” has a perfect autonomy and freedom as to their actions and the disposition of their possessions, limited only by the similar rights-based claims of other atomistic individuals, are in stark contrast with the prevailing understandings in ecology, feminist theory, as well as many, if not all, Indigenous and other non-Western worldviews. What these views have in common is the emphasis on relationality. In ecology this means the interconnectedness of all beings in an ecosystem and in the whole Earth System, in feminist theories the idea of autonomy as an inherently relational concept, and in many non-Western and Indigenous worldviews the relational ontologies, in which e.g. reciprocity and situated knowledge are embraced.

Institutionalizing RoN as abstract claim-rights might end up reflecting the anthropocentric interests to conserve “the Nature” or parts of it, for e.g., “ecosystem services” or “recreational areas”, doing little to challenge the exploitative logic of domination underlying the relationship of humans with nonhuman entities. Instead, a relational approach has the potential to release the concept of rights from its (neo)liberalistic burdens and allow RoN to contribute to radical, systemic change. In this paper I will explore different ways the relational approach could reconstruct RoN: recognising the subject of rights as part of interconnected relations, emphasizing the function of rights to protect these relations, and advocating for the need of intimate relationship between the natural entity as a right-holder and its representative, in order to enforce a truly ecocentric right.

As IPCC reports have shown, our business-as-usual future is not acceptable. Arctic marine social-ecological systems are already experiencing increasing irreversible losses at a higher speed than in other parts of the world. Beyond ecological threats, rapid technological development in fishing technologies also poses challenges, for instance on fisheries in the Arctic. Thus, radical transformation is needed to shape our common future, as it has also been recognized by the UN Decade on Ocean Science. However, there is an inherent ethical implication of how, by who, for whom, and with what assumptions are possible futures shaped, as a broad inclusion of stakeholders has been shown to be essential to ensure just futures. This study thus unpacks the ethical implications of whose voice is heard when shaping the future of the Arctic, with a focus on an aspect that will heavily impact the years to come: emerging and disruptive digital technologies used for natural resource extraction (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, autonomous technologies). To place the ethical question of stakeholder inclusion into perspective, this study uses a multi-lens theoretical framework that is guided by: definition(s) of stakeholders, theories of intersectionality, ethics (e.g. virtue, consequential, care, deontological), justice (e.g. social, global, intergenerational, environmental, climate); social-ecological transformation theory, and theory of extractivism. The methodological approach uses this multi-lens theoretical framework for reflexive thematic analysis of relevant scientific, peer-reviewed works about the ethics of natural resource extraction and of existing ethical guidelines for emerging and disruptive digital technologies. Ethical implications are revealed of who should be heard and how, with suggesting a redefinition of stakeholders. This study evaluates whether already existing ethical guidelines for digital technologies account for the rights of all relevant stakeholders and if these are sufficient to safeguard marine social-ecological systems in the Arctic now and in the future, whereas it proposes novel guidelines where this is found necessary. This is of crucial importance as such guidelines can both enable or hinder sustainable transformations at the intersection between natural resource extraction and the application of emerging and disruptive digital technologies.