This article was originally written as a section of my piece giving An Overview of Interconnected Law, but I thought it deserved a stand-alone blog post too. The underlying idea of Interconnected Law and socio-ecological relations is therefore absent here. To give a brief summary: humans, society, and nature are interwoven in dense networks of […]
A Socio-ecological Approach to Human Rights
June 29, 2026
Socio-ecological thinking challenges the traditional approaches to human rights, based on an abstracted bounded individual subject atomised out of social relations and separated from any ecological world. Here, a socio-ecological relational approach is taken to human rights.
The main thrust was that understanding law relationally, and in particular its role in reproducing the social order, is key to understanding the rule of law and law’s entanglement in current political crises
Socio-Ecological Thinking and Environmental Law
June 2, 2026
Interconnected Law prompts us to think in terms of socio-ecological relations, coming from the key insight of Social Ecology that any environmental relations are intertwined with social relations. Ecological and environmental thinking is necessarily relational because ecology is relational and thinking about the environment is thinking about human relationships to it, and there is environmental law scholarship – such as socio-legal and political ecology approaches – which could be considered to be relational and perhaps sometimes within a socio-ecological paradigm. Yet most thinking is still rooted in conceptions of humans as fundamentally separate from nature, and often does not understand humans as socially relational.