This chapter interrogates trends in how the natural world is taken up, governed and constituted by international law, in particular the growing marketisation of environmental governance. This chapter suggests it is fruitful to understand these contemporary forms of governance as constituted by the co-articulation of two older anthropocentric modalities of exercising power over nature: appropriative domination and stewardship. It provides a background to both these modalities, showing that though these are often understood as opposites, on a deeper level they are similar. It suggests that the ‘offset’ relation is the paradigmatic example of the co-articulation of these two modalities, as the ‘offset’ establishes a relationship between activities that damage the environment at one site and activities intended to protect, repair, or improve the environment elsewhere. This chapter situates such mechanisms as one element of a broader project to make nature legible in economic terms. In closing, this chapter considers the effects of the rise of ‘green governmentality’ and maps the terrain against which struggles for different nature/human relations take place.

This edited collection takes initial steps in a journey to understand better the relationship between international law and nature. We discover how international law systemically reproduces ecological injustice, and we explore the potential for equitable and sustainable disciplinary remakings. Specifically, we identify the inaccurate and harmful assumptions about nature underpinning conceptualizations of sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development, labour and human rights. To productively reimagine our discipline, we turn to Indigenous legal traditions, TWAIL, postcolonialism and decoloniality; to political ecology and ecocosmology; and to mythmaking, storytelling and song lines for inspiration. We hope other concepts and traditions will inform this ongoing endeavour. Even as international law continues to structure ecological harm, we see hope in growing transnational solidarity and alliances between the poor and subaltern classes that are challenging legal systems with better understandings of the relationship between nature and law.

Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global concerns for which peoples and states have turned to international law for solutions. This edited collection asks how international lawyers have understood the environment: What exactly is it and how do international lawyers purport to govern it? These seemingly straightforward questions have the potential to unmake our discipline through destabilizing formative assumptions about the separation between subjects and objects of governance, between the social and the natural, and between the human and non-human. We explain in this introductory chapter that reexamining international law assumptions about the natural world is not mere theoretical speculation. It is an urgent and necessary step for addressing pressing environmental challenges.

This chapter debates historical responsibility for climate change. The argument from historical responsibility has a legal dimension, as it is often used to assert the heightened mitigation and compensation obligations of some states. The debate here begins with the question of whether certain historically high-emitting states are legally bound to provide some sort of compensation for past levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Sarah Mason-Case and Julia Dehm answer this question in the affirmative, arguing that international law, but also notions of justice, provide bases for recognizing historical responsibility and for claiming reparation for the wrongs inflicted. Alexander Zahar, on the negative side, attacks the assumption that historical emissions and their growth rate since Industrialization are known accurately enough, such as to allow for blame to be pinned on certain countries and not others.

This chapter is concerned with how a claim to global authority over land and resources in the Global South has been invoked and the shape or form it has been given. It shows how the designation of both climate change and tropical deforestation as matters of ‘common concern’ has operated to authorise global authority over activities within national states that contribute to these processes. It interrogates how climate change has come to be understood in specific ways as an ‘object’ or ‘problem’ for law, and how this has given a distinctive shape to the climate regime. Finally, although forests have historically been subject to competing claims of international, national and local ownership, it shows how the focus on the capacity of forests to sequester carbon and function as carbon sinks has made it possible for the issue of deforestation, and thus also forest management, to be understood as a matter of global, rather than simply local or national, concern.

This chapter turns to consider questions of scale by interrogating the multilayered system of governance that REDD+ envisions, as established through the allocation of forest resource rights to diverse social actors at the local, national and international levels. It reads debates about carbon rights in REDD+ alongside broader trends relating to natural resource governance, common property regimes (CPRs) and community resource management to show how frameworks for the allocation of layered, or nested, rights in the forest carbon economy is another legal technology through which authority over land is transferred to international actors and away from people who live in and around forested areas.

This chapter explores a key effect of REDD+, namely that it recasts how the North–South differentiation in the climate regime is understood and how questions of responsibility and capacity for climate mitigation are conceptualised. This has the effect of enabling the countries of the Global North – who bear the greater responsibility for GHG production – to evade necessary action to ameliorate the climate crisis. Simultaneously, an emphasis on the presumed lack of capacity of Global South countries to act on climate disruption has provided a justification or authorisation for greater international intervention in the name of assisting them to act on climate change. This chapter examines debates over the contentious principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capacities in the climate regime and explores changes in how the principle is interpreted and enacted over time. It also shows how the adoption of flexibility mechanisms within the regime transformed how differentiation is operationalised in practice. Finally, this chapter shows how the discourse of ‘capacity building’ in the climate regime has facilitated the establishment of regulatory and legal infrastructure to support neoliberal markets, especially through REDD+-readiness programs.