Environmental Governance, Rule of Law, Democracy, Justice and Ethics: Anthropocentric, Biocentric and Ecocentric Approaches and the Rights of Nature Debate

Laws do not protect the environment by themselves. They need institutions to apply them, a public that can take part in decisions, a fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and an underlying view of why nature matters at all. This topic examines those foundations: governance, the environmental rule of law, environmental democracy and justice, the ethical approaches that shape the law, and the jurisprudential debate on whether nature itself should have rights.

1. Environmental Governance in India

Environmental governance means the whole set of rules, institutions, processes and actors through which decisions affecting the environment are made, implemented and reviewed. It is wider than government. It includes courts and tribunals, local bodies, markets, industry, civil society and communities.

1.1 The architecture

At the central level, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is the nodal ministry. It frames rules and standards, grants environmental and forest clearances, and oversees bodies such as the Central Pollution Control Board, the National Biodiversity Authority, the National Tiger Conservation Authority, the Central Zoo Authority and the Commission for Air Quality Management. Specialised authorities are created under Section 3(3) of the EPA, such as the Central Ground Water Authority and, since 2023, the Central Empowered Committee.

At the State level, State Pollution Control Boards grant consents and enforce standards, forest departments manage forests, State Biodiversity Boards regulate access to biological resources, and State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities appraise projects in category B under the EIA Notification, 2006.

At the local level, panchayats and municipalities carry environmental functions under the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules, Biodiversity Management Committees maintain People's Biodiversity Registers, and Gram Sabhas exercise powers under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996.

Adjudicatory and oversight bodies complete the picture: the National Green Tribunal, the High Courts and the Supreme Court, and the Comptroller and Auditor General, which conducts environmental audits of government programmes.

1.2 Principles of good environmental governance

1. Rule of law: decisions follow clear, published rules applied consistently.
2. Transparency: information on environmental decisions and conditions is available to the public.
3. Participation: affected people have a real voice before decisions are made.
4. Accountability: decision-makers answer for their decisions to courts, legislatures and the public.
5. Integration: environmental concerns are built into economic and sectoral policy.
6. Subsidiarity: decisions are taken at the lowest level capable of taking them effectively.
7. Adaptiveness: rules are revised as science and conditions change.

1.3 Weaknesses

The persistent weaknesses of Indian environmental governance are well documented: understaffed and under-equipped pollution control boards, overlapping jurisdictions between departments and levels of government, poor monitoring of clearance conditions, dilution of rules by executive circulars, and heavy reliance on courts to compel action. In Techi Tagi Tara v. Rajendra Singh Bhandari, (2018) 11 SCC 734, the Supreme Court noted that State Pollution Control Boards were often headed by persons without environmental expertise and directed that proper appointment rules be framed.

2. Environmental Rule of Law

The environmental rule of law applies the general idea of the rule of law to the environmental field. UNEP's first global report on the subject (2019) found that environmental laws had multiplied roughly thirty-eight-fold since 1972, but that failure to implement and enforce them was one of the greatest challenges to environmental protection. The International Union for Conservation of Nature adopted a World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law in 2016.

Its elements are: fair, clear and implementable environmental laws; access to information, participation and justice; accountable and effective institutions; clear mandates and co-ordination among agencies; compliance and enforcement mechanisms; and protection of environmental defenders.

3. Environmental Democracy

Environmental democracy is the idea that people affected by environmental decisions should be able to know about them, take part in them and challenge them. It rests on the three access rights of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, 1992: access to information, public participation and access to justice. Europe made them binding in the Aarhus Convention, 1998, and Latin America and the Caribbean in the Escazú Agreement, 2018, which also protects environmental defenders. India is not a party to either, but its domestic law secures all three rights.

3.1 The three pillars in Indian law

1. Access to information. The Right to Information Act, 2005; publication of draft EIA reports and executive summaries; environmental statements filed by industries. In Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy v. Union of India, (2005) 13 SCC 186, the Supreme Court recognised that the right to information and community participation for the protection of the environment and human health flows from Article 21.
2. Public participation. Public consultation and public hearing under the EIA Notification, 2006; consent of the Gram Sabha for diversion of forest land under the Forest Rights Act, 2006; consultation with Gram Sabhas in Scheduled Areas under the PESA Act, 1996.
3. Access to justice. Public interest litigation under Articles 32 and 226; the National Green Tribunal, before which 'any person aggrieved' may file an application or appeal; citizen complaints under Section 19, EPA.

4. Environmental Justice

Environmental justice concerns the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens and the fair treatment of all people in environmental decision-making. The expression emerged in the United States in the 1980s, after protests in 1982 against a landfill for PCB-contaminated soil in a predominantly African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina. A 1987 report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, and the work of the sociologist Robert Bullard showed that hazardous facilities were disproportionately located in poor and minority neighbourhoods.

4.1 Dimensions of environmental justice

• Distributive justice: who bears the pollution, displacement and health risks, and who enjoys the benefits.
• Procedural justice: who has a voice in the decision.
• Justice as recognition: whether the identity, culture and knowledge of affected communities are respected.
• Corrective or restorative justice: whether those harmed are compensated and the environment restored.

4.2 Environmental justice in India

In India the question is less about race than about class, caste, tribe and region. The victims of Bhopal were largely the urban poor living beside the plant. Large dams and mines have displaced millions, a disproportionate number of them Adivasis. Forest laws of the colonial era criminalised the customary use of forests by the communities who had conserved them. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 describes itself as undoing a 'historical injustice' to forest-dwelling communities, and the Supreme Court has protected the rights of tribal communities in Scheduled Areas.

At the international level, environmental justice appears as climate justice: the countries and people least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions suffer most from climate change. India's insistence on common but differentiated responsibilities is an argument of climate justice.

5. Environmental Ethics and the Three Approaches

Environmental ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies the moral relationship between human beings and the natural world. It asks whether nature has value only because it is useful to us, or whether it has value in itself. Every environmental law carries an answer to that question, stated or not.

5.1 The anthropocentric approach

Anthropocentrism places human beings at the centre of moral concern. Nature is protected because, and to the extent that, it serves human health, welfare and prosperity. A distinction is drawn between strong anthropocentrism, which values nature only for immediate human use, and weak anthropocentrism (Bryan Norton), which values nature for its contribution to long-term human flourishing, including that of future generations.

Most environmental law is anthropocentric. Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration speaks of man's right to an adequate environment, and Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration states that human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. In India, the entire Article 21 line of cases, from Subhash Kumar (1991) onwards, protects the environment as part of the human right to life.

5.2 The biocentric approach

Biocentrism extends moral concern to every living being. Albert Schweitzer's ethic of 'reverence for life' and Paul Taylor's Respect for Nature (1986) argue that each organism has its own good and inherent worth. The animal-rights writing of Peter Singer (Animal Liberation, 1975) and Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights, 1983) is closely related.

The Constitution adopts a biocentric element in Article 51A(g), which requires citizens 'to have compassion for living creatures'. In Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja, (2014) 7 SCC 547, the Supreme Court read Articles 51A(g) and (h) with the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, recognised the 'five freedoms' of animals, and held that animals have a right to live with dignity and free from unnecessary pain and suffering. A Constitution Bench in 2023 later upheld the State amendments permitting Jallikattu, but did not disturb the underlying welfare principles.

5.3 The ecocentric approach

Ecocentrism locates value in ecosystems as wholes, including their non-living components and processes. Aldo Leopold's land ethic, in A Sand County Almanac (1949), states the test: 'A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.' Arne Naess's deep ecology (1973) and the ecofeminist writing of Vandana Shiva extend this view.

5.4 The three approaches compared

India's own traditions offer a fourth perspective that resists the division: the Prithvi Sukta, the Bishnoi and Chipko movements, and Gandhi's remark that the earth provides enough to satisfy every person's needs but not every person's greed. They combine reverence for nature with human use, and courts have invoked them to give content to Article 51A(g).

6. Rights of Nature: The Jurisprudential Debate

The ecocentric approach raises a direct legal question: should nature itself be a legal person with rights enforceable in court? The modern debate began with Christopher Stone's article Should Trees Have Standing? (1972), which argued that the law had repeatedly extended rights to new subjects and could extend them to natural objects. In Sierra Club v. Morton (1972) Justice Douglas of the US Supreme Court, dissenting, adopted the idea.

6.1 Developments around the world

• Ecuador: the Constitution of 2008 (Articles 71 to 74) recognises the rights of nature (Pachamama). The Constitutional Court enforced them in the Los Cedros forest case (2021).
• Bolivia: the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, 2010.
• New Zealand: the Te Urewera Act, 2014 and the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, 2017 grant legal personhood to a former national park and a river, with guardians drawn from the Crown and the Maori.
• Colombia: the Constitutional Court recognised the Atrato River as a subject of rights (2016), and the Supreme Court did the same for the Colombian Amazon (2018).
• Bangladesh: the Supreme Court declared all rivers of the country to be living entities (2019).

6.2 Indian developments

In Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand (20 March 2017) the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna, their tributaries and streams to be legal and living entities with the rights of a legal person, and appointed State officials as their guardians. Ten days later, in Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand (30 March 2017), the same court extended the status to glaciers, forests, lakes, meadows and other natural features. On the State's appeal, the Supreme Court stayed the Ganga and Yamuna decision in July 2017. The State had argued, among other things, that it was unclear who would be liable if a flooded river caused damage, and that the rivers flow through other States beyond the High Court's jurisdiction.

The idea has resurfaced in other High Courts. The Uttarakhand High Court declared the animal kingdom a legal entity in Narayan Dutt Bhatt v. Union of India (2018), the Punjab and Haryana High Court did the same in Karnail Singh v. State of Haryana (2019), and the Madras High Court in 2022 described 'Mother Nature' as a living being with the rights of a legal person.

6.3 The arguments

For the rights of nature, five arguments are usually made. First, legal personality is a legal construct, already extended to companies, ships, trusts and, in India, to Hindu idols (Pramatha Nath Mullick v. Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, 1925, Privy Council) and the Guru Granth Sahib (Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee v. Som Nath Dass, (2000) 4 SCC 146); there is no conceptual bar to extending it to a river. Second, it solves the problem of standing, since harm to the river becomes injury to a legal person. Third, it allows damages to be measured by the injury to nature, not merely to human interests. Fourth, it gives legal form to ecocentric ethics. Fifth, it respects indigenous and religious world-views in which rivers and mountains are living beings.

Against the rights of nature, the objections are equally serious. Who speaks for nature, and what happens when guardians disagree or are themselves the polluters? If a river has rights, does it also have duties and liabilities, for example for floods? Rights of nature may collide with human needs for water, energy and livelihood, with no clear principle for resolving the conflict. Existing doctrines such as the public trust, the precautionary principle and Article 21 already allow courts to protect rivers, so the innovation may be symbolic. And judicial declarations without legislative and institutional support may prove unenforceable, as the Indian experience suggests.

7. Related Topics and Provisions