Collective rights, rights of Nature and defence of the commons. Roadmap for a possible future

Abstract

The present text proposes a reflection on the need to articulate three realities called to be protagonists in the framework of the challenges of the ecological and, therefore, social collapse that we are facing. It is a matter, it argues, of combining a series of social and legal-political tools capable of playing a role of creative, transformative contestation. We refer specifically to the role of collective rights, the practices of the commons and the consideration of Nature as a subject of rights. It is argued that there is a potential in these three realities that depends, to a large extent, on their capacity to reinforce each other, to move forward together. The idea is to draw in such synergies a way of reinforcing the transformative capacities of the instituting, of the social practices that, beyond contestation or vindication, are capable of prefiguring, of instituting radically different, necessarily egalitarian, relational patterns that can be expanded and replicated. In short, this text aims to contribute to vindicate the richness and importance of practices that, in the face of the supposed cultural victory of neoliberal individualism, can putt the most threatened collective needs in common.