95 research outputs found
Sharing First Law and Wake Up the Snake
No full textProfessor Anne Poelina talks about the importance of First Law and of protecting the Martuwarra, Fitzroy River, a Living Ancestral Being, in a Zoom interview with Dr Cristy Clark (23rd May 2022).
Poelina, A., & Clark, C. (2022, May 23rd). Sharing First Law and Wake Up the Snake: An Interview with Professor Anne Poelina. Available at: https://vimeo.com/71405950
The Lawful Forest:A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice
No full textThis book is a study of the critical history of space, and the ways in which a dominant property ideology has entrenched an exclusionary and profoundly alienating version of spatial ordering. It focuses on select periods in time, when the seemingly linear trajectory of enclosure momentarily wavers and alternate spatial paths briefly materialise, before ‘disappearing’ from plain sight. Using the forest as a thematic device, Cristy Clark and John Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships: between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the public square
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The Lawful Forest ::A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice /
No full textViews the 'lawful forest' as both a material forest of trees, and a metaphor for a more relational understanding of law, property and placeUndertakes a wide-ranging exploration of our diverse relationships with land that brings together critical property theory and legal geographyExplores spatial justice, Indigenous perspectives, and the intersecting discourses of property and human rightsDraws on the literature of critical common law property, legal geography, the radical commons, legal custom, protest and the forestIncludes line drawings at the beginning of each chapter that evoke the imagery of the forest to create thematic links between each sectionThis book is a study of the critical history of space, and the ways in which a dominant property ideology has entrenched an exclusionary and profoundly alienating version of spatial ordering. It focuses on select periods in time, when the seemingly linear trajectory of enclosure momentarily wavers and alternate spatial paths briefly materialise, before 'disappearing' from plain sight. Using the forest as a thematic device, Cristy Clark and John Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships: between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the public square.The book draws on a range of case studies including the 13th century Forest Charter, Thomas More's Utopia, the Diggers' radical agrarianism, the Paris Commune's battle for the right to the city, and Australian forest protestors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By analysing these movements and their contexts, Clark and Page illustrate the origin, history and legal status of the lawful forest and its modern-day companions. Although the dominant spatial paradigm is one where private rights prevail, this book shows that communal relationships with land have always been part of our law and culture
Of what use is a deradicalized human right to water?
No full textSince the human right to water began to receive institutional recognition and interpretation at both international and domestic levels, concerns have been raised that the water justice movement has allowed its demands to be deradicalized by focusing on ‘rights talk’. This critique has focused particularly on explicit statements of compatibility between rights and commodification (through neoliberal models of water governance)—joining an ongoing critical legal studies debate over whether rights discourse ought to be avoided by social movements in favour of alternative approaches to securing social change. This article applies the insights of legal pluralism (that law is not monolithic and legal norms are continually re-constructed by a multiplicity of actors) to four case studies (South Africa, the United States of America, Ecuador and Bolivia) where social movements have relied on rights-based litigation and ‘rights talk’ to further their pursuit of water justice. An analysis of these case studies highlights that, despite the risk of deradicalization, rights-based activism can yield practical benefits and counter-hegemonic possibilities, including the articulation of more radical conceptions of the right to water; but the case studies also highlight the ongoing structural barriers to establishing community control over water governance in order to (re)claim the water commons
Natural resources and environmental justice: Australian perspectives
No full textNatural Resources and Environmental Justice endeavours to cover an incredible diversity of disciplinary perspectives on the intersection between the environment and justice in Australia. Its chapters tackle issues of both social and ecological justice within the fields of environmental law, ecological economics, water governance, environmental philosophy, political theory and human rights, and include big picture theory, geographically specific case studies and plenty in between
Global Goal Setting and the Human Right to Water
No full textSince the 1970s, global goal setting to increase access to safe drinking water has taken a number of different approaches to whether water should be primarily understood as a “human right” or a “human need.” In the Mar del Plata declaration of 1977, states both recognized a human right to water and committed themselves to achieving universal access by 1990. By the 1990 New Delhi Statement, with universal access still out of reach, the goal was renewed with a new deadline of 2000, but water was described as a human need rather than a human right. This approach was coupled with an emphasis on water’s economic values and the need for increased cost recovery, which in turn increased the focus on, and uptake of, private-sector participation in the delivery of water and sanitation services across the Global South.A similar needs-based approach was adopted at the start of the new millennium in Target 7 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but during this decade a consensus on the recognition of the human right to water also emerged in international law. As the normative status and content of this right came to be better articulated and understood, it began to influence the practice of providing water and sanitation services, and by the end of the MDG process a rights-based approach featured more prominently in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015.While the provision of water and sanitation services is multifaceted, the evidence of global achievements from the 1970s onward indicates that a rights-based approach increases the priority given to the social values of such services and focuses attention on the need to go beyond technical solutions to address the structural issues at the heart of water inequality. Going forward, approaches to the provision of water and sanitation services and the human right to water will need to continue to adapt to new challenges and to changing conceptualizations of water, including the growing recognition that all living things have a right to water and that water itself can have rights
Race, austerity and water justice in the United States
No full textIn April 2014, residents of Flint, Michigan, noticed their water turning brown, green, and yellow. Immediately after being switched to the Flint River for austerity reasons, their tap water smelled and tasted foul. Soon the evidence began to mount that it was making them acutely ill: causing widespread lead poisoning and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease. Meanwhile, households in nearby Detroit began having their water supply cut off. Over the subsequent years, both cities experienced what can only be described as a water crisis. Drawing on fieldwork and documentary research, this chapter argues that not only were these water crises linked, but they were a direct result of the democratic deficit caused by structural racism and the ‘financialisation’ of governance. In both Detroit and Flint, the imposition of austerity through the antidemocratic means of Emergency Management has been influenced by systematic and structural racism, and the effects on residential water services have also reflected this democratic deficit and racialized political landscape. In this way, the situation in both cities, including the right to water campaigns that have developed in response, is remarkably similar to water justice issues in cities, such as Johannesburg, across the Global South.</p
Book review: Jana Norman, Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene (Routledge, Abingdon 2022) 186 pp.
No full textMetgasco Limited v Minister for Resources and Energy
No full textThe Bentley Blockade came to a head in May 2014, when thousands of people gathered at the site to prevent Metgasco from delivering its drilling equipment. Metgasco appealed the suspension and submitted documentation to the government to support its argument that it had engaged in adequate consultation. Metgasco's consultation activities had been primarily confined to information provision and it had chosen not to engage with community members who were opposed to coal seam gas (CSG) drilling – instead characterising them as being misinformed about the nature of its operations. The Delegate's second decision to suspend Metgasco's Activity Approval was not separately invalid because, in asserting that a condition requiring 'effective consultation' had been breached, it took into account an irrelevant consideration, that being the results of the consultation, rather than focusing upon the attributes of the consultation itself. Metgasco sought judicial review of the Delegate's two decisions to suspend its Activity Approval before the Supreme Court of New South Wales
Trans-jurisdictional water governance and implementing the human right to water in South Africa
No full textIn April 1994 South Africa held its first full, democratic elections and the African National Congress (ANC) won a 62.6% majority (Harvey, R., 2003, p. 242). This signalled the beginning of a new era of democracy in South Africa and carried with it the promise of equality and dignity for black South Africans. This promise was then enshrined in the new Constitution, which contained a Bill of Rights and protected participation, equality and a wide range of socioeconomic rights, including the human right to water (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996, ss. 7(1), 27, 33(1)). As the Constitution allocates responsibility for the delivery of water services to local government (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996, sch. 4, pt. B), it binds all levels of government to take ‘reasonable legislative and other measures’ to progressively realize the right to water. This chapter situates this division of constitutional responsibilities as a trans-jurisdictional water governance arrangement
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