Worlds Otherwise: The Society-Nature Relations and Laws of Satoyama

This thesis explores the nature-society relations and laws of satoyama, a site of socio-ecological revitalisation in Japan. Situated at the intersection between conservation and sustainability, and across global and local scales, satoyama represents a unique space for rethinking the boundaries of environmental law, as it gives voice to plural discourses and practices regulating society-nature relations. Set against this context, this thesis challenges present conventional strands of environmental law scholarship, to advance a decolonial environmental law approach to the study of environmental law, capable of accounting for law’s place and power within society-nature relations. Stemming from this normative stance, there is an empirical necessity to analyse the ways in which diverse strands of law interact at specific sites. As both an autonomous set of local organisations and an international partnership acknowledged by the Convention on Biological Diversity, satoyama is a site where multiple legal worlds and society-nature relations intersect. Utilising multi-sited and multi-species ethnography, this thesis analyses the laws, and their intersections, that shape nature-society relations in satoyama by employing a legal pluralist analytical framework. The thesis aims firstly, to contribute toward a decolonial framework for environmental law scholarship. Secondly, to a methodological and analytical approach capable of addressing the needs of that decolonial framework. Thirdly, a power sensitive critique of law’s entanglement in conservation and sustainability paradigms. Finally, an investigation of the overlooked laws of satoyama.