Living as Nature: Māori Political Ecology and Bruno Latour’s Challenge to Western Modernity

This article examines the emancipatory potential of the rights of nature in Aotearoa New Zealand through Bruno Latour’s concept of political ecology. We argue that the legal recognition of entities such as Te Urewera Forest and the Whanganui River as legal persons constitutes a paradigmatic experiment in reconfiguring the modern division between nature and politics. Drawing on Latour’s critique of Western modernity and his notion of hybrids and actants, we show how Māori struggles for land, mana, and “geographical identity” generate a political collective in which decolonial and ecological motives are inseparably intertwined. Rights of nature function here not merely as environmental protection instruments, but also as devices for redistributing power and legally encoding Māori concepts such as kaitiakitanga, whakapapa, and ‘listening to Papatūānuku’. In this sense, ecological and decolonial objectives converge rather than compete. We then contrast these developments with global biodiversity governance, focusing on Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and its Life Framework of Values. While Life framework of values (IPBES) has significantly broadened its conceptual framework—particularly through the recognition of the relational and cultural values of nature—the challenge lies in translating this expanded recognition into governance practice. Policy and decision-making processes still often tend to privilege measurable and instrumental, and benefit-oriented valuation frameworks, which can make the integration of relational values difficult. The New Zealand cases thus illuminate both the radical promise and the structural limits of institutionalizing Latourian political ecology: they realize a non-modern governance of human and non-human actors domestically, while exposing the continued dominance of capitalist modernity at the global level.