Narratives of Environmentalism in National Laws

• Author: Julia Jester,Shumaila Fatima,Alphonse Opoku,Nidhi Bangalore,Farah Hennawi,Caroline Nabbie,Sneha Saravanan,Andreas Duit,Andrew Hargrove,Jamie M. Sommer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10704965221132271
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Journal of Environment &

Development

2023, Vol. 32(1) 3–33

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10704965221132271

journals.sagepub.com/home/jed

Narratives of

Environmentalism in

National Laws

Julia Jester

1

, Shumaila Fatima

2

,

Alphonse Opoku

2

, Nidhi Bangalore

2

,

Farah Hennawi

2

, Caroline Nabbie

2

,

Sneha Saravanan

2

, Andreas Duit

3

,

Andrew Hargrove

2

, and

Jamie M. Sommer

2



Abstract

For several decades, national environmental framework laws have come into existence

to def‌ine its citizens’environmental rights and duties, as well as express how the

government will manage and protect the environment. However, previous research

has not considered how a nation’s highest form of law promising environmental

protection and management conveys its role or supports relevant parties. To f‌ill this

gap, we do a narrative analysis to see what themes emerged in 44 national envi-

ronmental framework laws across the world. The main themes are (1) Rights and

responsibilities of citizens and corporations, (2) Rights of the natural environment, (3)

Environmental knowledge, (4) Governing the natural environment, and (5) External

inf‌luences. Overall, we argue that the narratives we observed in the national envi-

ronmental framework laws helps shape and reify the existing human domination of the

natural environment for our own benef‌it and survival under the guise of protection.

Keywords

environmental rights, environmental exploitation, capitalism, natural environment,

environmental citizenship, corporations, human domination

1

Friends Research Institute

2

University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

3

Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Shumaila Fatima, Sociology, University of South Florida, 4202 E Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.

Email: sfatima@usf.edu

Introduction

Beginning in the 1970s, increased global attention to environmental issues, largely

resulting from globalization, led to the proliferation of environmental laws (Yang &

Percival, 2009). In the last few decades, researchers have documented how the social

contract between the citizen and the state across the world has been amended to include

environmental citizenship—including the development of national environmental

laws. Environmental citizenship, or the set of environmental rights and duties nations

bestow upon their citizens through their laws, is expanding in countries across the

world (McDonald & McCormack, 2021;Yazykova & Bruch, 2018). Previous research

in the world society tradition shows that nations tended to develop national envi-

ronmental framework laws in a top-down manner (Frank et al., 2000). In this ex-

planation, global norms, generally perpetuated by and for the benef‌it of powerful global

actors in aff‌luent nations including the United Nations and international nongovern-

mental organizations, dictated the nation-state as the responsible body for environ-

mental protection (Frank et al., 2000;Shorette et al., 2017). Of many avenues of

inf‌luence, international environmental conventions and treaties helped communicate

global environmental expectations, such as asserting norms of a nation’s interest in

protecting the environment, as well as establishing material changes, including en-

vironmental ministries and environmental impact assessments (Haas & Sundgren,

1993;Meyer et al., 1997).

These global environmental norms have been reinterpreted and codif‌ied into na-

tional law across the majority of nations in the world over a relatively short period of

time (Frank et al., 2000). Though this history presupposes the uniformity of national

environmental laws, it does not necessitate the seriousness of a nation’s commitment to

protecting the environment, nor does it imply standardization of environmental pro-

tection. In fact, several scholars have read and coded constitutions, other general

national laws, and some environmental laws exploring the extent of environmental law

expansion and f‌ind it improves the lives of citizens and helps protect natural envi-

ronments (Barry, 2006;Boyd, 2012;Lewis, 2018). Still, other researchers argue such

rights will not lead to changes for humans or the environment, especially if they do not

challenge the existing social structures that tend to privilege the economy over in-

dividuals and natural environments (Gonzelez, 2015;Mwanga, 2022;Wellman, 2018).

While previous research hypothesized a specif‌ic frame these national laws follow, no

research has tried to identify shared narratives among national environmental laws with

regard to the law’s historical and national context in the larger global environmental

rights regime. Thus, this research is important in helping to identify these, often

abstract, global environmental norms in general, and the ways they are reinterpreted at

the national level with respect to the national values, norms, level of wealth, colonial

heritage, governance structure, natural disasters experienced, and time period, as well

as many other factors shape the way in which the law is written, decided upon, and

interpreted.

We expand this previous research by considering how national environmental

framework laws codify environmental citizenship and natural environments. Diverging

4The Journal of Environment & Development 32(1)