LAW AND EXTRACTIVISM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

An underlying cause of the intersecting climate and ecological crises the planet faces is the unsustainable extraction of land, resources and minerals. Over the past two decades, the extraction and processing of natural resources has accelerated and intensified, and it is now responsible for 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress as well as half of global climate impacts (Global Resources Outlook 2019). The term “extractivism” refers to both to the activities and practices used to take resources from nature for human use as well as an ideological premise that humans and nation-states hold the right to appropriate, control, seize and exploit land and resources. Extractivism should be understood as a specific way of relating to nature that is non-reciprocal and focused on accumulation and short-term benefits. The practices and ideology of extractivism are intertwined with the histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Extractivism has produced a racialised global political economy, characterised by the removal of raw materials from the Global South for processing and consumption in the Global North, which reproduces relations of dependency, unequal development and uneven accumulation. In order to understand many of the increasingly intense struggles between states, transnational corporations and local communities over land and place, it is crucial to understand the dynamics that have shaped the global extractivist economy. This project will provide an innovative analysis of the role of law in embedding extractivism and preventing alternative systems of resource distribution from flourishing.

It will do so by:

  • Providing a critical-historical account of how laws that facilitate resource extraction have gradually been globalised and the institutional practices that have enabled this; and
  • Theorising how such laws are authorised by specific representational practices, knowledges and assumptions and a presumed distinction between the living and non-living.

 

SPECIAL ISSUES

Two special issues are forthcoming:

WORKSHOP

The workshop held at La Trobe Law School on 24-25 July 2023, brought together established and emerging scholars to explore the relationship between law and extractivism in the Anthropocene.

PROJECT CONVENORS

Kathleen Birrell

Kathleen Birrell

Senior Lecturer, La Trobe University

Dr Kathleen Birrell is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Research in Law at La Trobe Law School. Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to explore the changing relationship between law and ecology, law and humanities and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (Routledge, 2016). Her current projects explore the implications of new materialism and geophilosophy for legal scholarship, practice and activism in the context of the Anthropocene. She teaches and supervises students in the areas of legal theory, law and humanities, law and politics, property law, environmental law, and climate law. She is President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and Editor of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.

Martin Clark

Martin Clark

Lecturer, La Trobe University

Martin Clark is a Lecturer in Law at La Trobe. His research focuses on the history of legal thought and international and public law. His work has been published in the Modern Law Review, the British Yearbook of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law and the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, and he is finishing a book (with Dr Yoriko Otomo) on law and commodities, Eating the World: A Global History of Law and Commodities (with Counterpress).

Julia Dehm

Julia Dehm

Associate Professor

Julia Dehm is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was supported by a La Trobe University ABC Grant and the International and Comparative Law Cluster, La Trobe Law School.

Photo by Dion Beetson on Unsplash