Christine J. Winter

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

In A Climate of History Dipesh Chakrabarty locates Kant’s speculative reading of Genesis as “the Enduring Fable” furnishing the background for human domination and earthly destruction. Writing from the fable’s “ruins,” Chakrabarty urges the elaboration of new fables that provide the background ethics and meanings required to recast relations between humans and the natural world. Responding to Chakrabarty’s challenge, we outline two “fables” based first in the oft ignored Genesis 2, and second, in Matauranga Māori. Although marginalised, these extant fables provide the imaginary for radically other ways of being human in a more-than-human world in turmoil.

This book challenges mainstream Western IEJ in a manner that privileges indigenous philosophies and highlights the value these philosophies have for solving global environmental problems. Divided into three parts, the book begins by examining the framing of Western liberal environmental, intergenerational and indigenous justice theory and reviews decolonial theory. Using contemporary case studies drawn from the courts, film, biography, and protests actions, the second section explores contemporary Māori and Aboriginal experiences of values-conflict in encounters with politics and law. It demonstrates the deep ontological rifts between the philosophies that inform Māori and Aboriginal IJ and those of the West that underpin the politics and law of these two settler states. Existing Western IEJ theories, across distributional, communitarian, human rights based and the capabilities approach to IJ, are tested against obligations and duties of specific Māori and Aboriginal iwi and clans. Finally, in the third section, it explores the ways we relate to time and across generations to create regenerative IJ. Challenging the previous understanding of the conceptualization of time, it posits that it is in how we relate--human to human, human to nonhuman, nonhuman to human--that robust conceptualization of IEJ emerge. This volume presents an imagining of IEJ which accounts for indigenous norms on indigenous terms and explores how this might be applied in national and international responses to climate change and environmental degradation. Demonstrating how assumptions in mainstream justice theory continue to colonise indigenous people and render indigenous knowledge invisible, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental and intergenerational philosophy, political theory, indigenous studies and decolonial studies, and environmental humanities more broadly.

The idea of dignity is often taken to be a foundation for principles of justice and democracy. In the West it has numerous formulations and conceptualisations. Within the capabilities approach to justice theorists have expanded the concept of dignity to encompass animals and ecological communities. In this article I rework the idea of dignity to include the Māori philosophical concepts of Mauri, tapu and mana – something I argue is necessary if the capabilities approach is to decolonise in the Aotearoa context. Furthermore, the article links the nation’s recognition of three extensive geographical regions – Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Mt Taranaki – as legal persons to Mātauranga Māori and nonhuman dignity. In doing so, I identify the potential that this understanding of dignity and these legal moves have to decolonise democracy within the settler state.