Notes on the Just GLOBE Multispecies Justice Conference
Written by Violeta Gutiérrez Zamora, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University
After many fruitful email exchanges to prepare for the Just GLOBE Multispecies Conference (justglobeproject.com), I finally met with two of the four keynotes, Professors Danielle Celermajer and David Schlosberg, from the University of Sydney. In the middle of the auditorium, Danielle, with a lively smile, proudly showed me a photograph where she sat placidly with a pig, both resting peacefully side by side. This tender image complements a magazine article about her work and homestead on Dharawal country on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, which she describes as intentional multispecies community. During the two days we shared conversations with Danielle and David, it became clear why their book and conference presentation were so powerful. As colleagues and co-authors, they engage in constant dialogues, something that shows in their joint presentation as keynotes and in our informal chats. We agreed to have a short, recorded conversation while we walked from the University of Helsinki to the nearby Botanical Garden. While walking, they joked, challenged, and questioned each other, and in this dynamic conversation, they made their collective thinking evident.
During their keynote, David and Danielle presented the content of their recently published book Institutionalizing Multispecies Justice, co-authored with five other members of their research group: Anthony Burke, Stefanie R. Fishel, Erin Fitz-Henry, Nicole Rogers, and Christine Winter. The book is part of the Elements in Earth System Governance series published by Cambridge University Press.
In the book and presentation, they address some of the fundamental questions of our times: What forms of justice could we cultivate in the face of the interrelated crises that trouble our times—climate change, accelerated biodiversity loss, growing economic inequality, political polarization, and violent conflicts? What would it mean for local and global institutions to decenter their colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric gaze? What knowledges feelings, and forms of organization must we, as humans, listen to and reimagine to live in a more just and plural world—where many worlds coexist and flourish?
Such questions have gained momentum in recent decades and finding answers is more urgent than ever. There is a pressing need to explore how our current societies might rethink and institutionalize a justice that considers all Earth beings and their relations, which fundamentally make life on this planet possible. They explained that the concept of Multispecies Justice (MSJ) is useful, “Not because it’s the best, nor because it can’t be co-opted or diluted, but because it has gained relevance. It’s encouraging to see the variety of ways in which this kind of relationality and valuing of more-than-human relationships is growing.” In their book they assert that it is more helpful to work with concepts that are already in circulation to drive necessary transformations in both theory and practice than to adopt new or old ones, as these sometimes create barriers to convincing those who resist such changes.
At the core, MSJ challenges us to question how conventional theories and practices of justice remain complicit with the injustices and violence against Earth beings and the webs of life, to the extent that they should be implicated in the ongoing ecocide. Their book is a call for a radical shift of how we understand core principles of justice in democratic governance—participation, representation, voice, recognition, and reparation—from a perspective that treats more-than-human beings and their relations—whether animals, plants, rivers, forests, or entire ecosystems—as active subjects rather than passive receivers of protection or management. In philosophical terms, MSJ is embedded in a relational ontology of life, which understands all beings as fundamentally shaped by their relationships with others and the broader socioecological contexts in which they exist. It also proposes non-hierarchical ethics in which humans are no longer positioned at the center or placed above all other forms of life. The adoption of MSJ challenges the anthropocentric and colonial foundations of the legal, political, and ethical systems sustained by our current societies and states. It is not surprising that they adopt a pluriversal approach, which is an essential component in their framing of MSJ. The authors do not propose a single formula or set of rules for institutionalization, but advocate for recognizing the existence of multiple ways of being and existing, in line with specific onto-epistemic and ethical frameworks, such as those of Indigenous peoples, which have long resisted the dualisms between humanity and nature.
The MSJ premise is compelling and deep, not only because of its theoretical propositions but because they are grounded in the diversity of movements and knowledges that transcend the dichotomy of society and nature in Western thinking. In this sense, the authors include a diverse array of cases and theoretical reflections across geographies in the Global South and North. As David and Danielle explain, “these are grounded imaginaries. Part of our work is to observe social movements as creators of theory and practice. We view them as living examples of the creation and implementation of multispecies justice, and we see this in diverse ways, whether through artwork, legislative efforts or other forms of action.”
However, many academics and some activists may resist the notion of MSJ. Among the arguments is that it can hide the fact that not all humans have been equally responsible or vulnerable to colonial and capitalist violence, and even to the violence perpetrated in support of environmental conservation and green transitions, and therefore, socio-political issues are a priority. However, as the authors argue, the same power structures that produce ecological violence are intertwined with racial, economic, political, and gender injustices. Hence, the authors encouraged us to understand justice as something deeply relational and multi-scalar. In this sense, one of the main challenges of MSJ is how to address such a change in practice at the governance level. The authors, both in the book and in the presentation, discussed several examples and cases, from local to international governance, along with their debates, challenges, and controversies. They argue that institutionalizing MSJ is not only about adding new personhood to specific species, new rules, or government agencies. It requires a profound transformation across the epistemic (of knowledge), ethical (of what we value), and political (of power) realms.
Although the authors invite us to imagine new governance alternatives, they maintain the state, public policy, and legal frameworks as paths for change, if they take seriously responsibility, care, reciprocity, and interdependence. The challenge, from my perspective, is that these same institutions—the state, law, and policy—have historically been structures that have sustained and reproduced extractivist, colonial, and anthropocentric logics. This question embodies an unresolved tension between the state and Indigenous peoples, for instance when addressing territory and self-determination. The question that deserves more attention in this framing of MSJ is: can the same apparatus that has systematically excluded these other ways of being and existing in the world become an implementer of MSJ? This and other dilemmas invite readers to reflect on complex questions, think, and critically engage in the ongoing debate.
You can also read this story directly from the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) web page.
