Stories of Systemic Failure?

In Europe, calls for ecosystems to be granted rights are mounting. While socio-legal research on the Rights of Nature tends to focus on the strategies of the few success stories, less attention is given to the many failed or stagnated initiatives, many of them in Europe. “Landscaping the Rights of Nature” is both a methodological proposition and an analytical approach to examining procedures available to citizens to introduce the Rights of Nature to the courts of Europe. This article examines three sociopolitical territories from our fieldwork sites in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany in which procedures characteristic of Europe's democratic systems are used to mobilise national legal governance, international networks of lobbying groups, and citizens through artistic interventions. By engaging ethnographically with the wider sociopolitical processes involved in establishing rights for nature, we seek to offer a qualitative view on the possibilities and limitations of Europe's liberal democracies in effecting sociopolitical transformations.