In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Mónica Brito Vieira, University of York, and Sean Fleming, University of Nottingham, “Ecological Personhood: A Bridging Approach”.
After a centuries-long political and legal battle by the Māori people, in 2017 Aotearoa New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River. The Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act established a legal entity called Te Awa Tupua, which consists of the river “and all its physical and metaphysical elements.” The river can now perform legal actions, such as signing contracts and filing lawsuits, by acting through two representatives: one nominated by the Crown, and the other by Māori iwi (tribes) who have interests in the river. Since the river’s recognition as a legal person, several other courts have granted legal personhood to natural entities like rivers, mountains, and national parks.
Some scholars and activists have celebrated these developments. Proponents have argued that ecological personhood can serve as a powerful tool for enshrining Indigenous rights in Western legal systems, counterbalancing the power of corporations, and protecting the environment. On the other hand, critics have contended that granting legal personhood to natural entities is not compatible with Western legal and political systems. The United Kingdom’s representative at the 2024 United Nations Environmental Assembly, for instance, has argued that the idea of nature’s incompatibility with legal personhood is “a fundamental principle of the UK.”
Yet the concept of ecological personhood is hardly foreign to the Western political theory tradition, as political theorists Mónica Brito Vieira and Sean Fleming show in a recent APSR article. In their new article, they locate a justification for ecological personhood in the work of one of the Western theoretical tradition’s key thinkers: Thomas Hobbes. In his canonical 1651 book Leviathan, Hobbes famously argued that a multitude can be transformed into “One Person” through political representation. Similarly, Hobbes wrote, inanimate objects like churches, bridges, or even idols can be “personated,” if a representative can be authorized to speak and act on their behalf. While most of the scholarship on Hobbes’s theory of personhood has been applied to corporate entities like states, Brito Vieira and Fleming argue that the theory’s power lies in the idea that almost anyone or anything can perform as a person through representation.
Building on Hobbes’s theory, Brito Vieira and Fleming develop a new account of ecological personhood. The personhood of the Whanganui River follows the logic of Hobbes’s theory, but it also complicates Hobbes’s simple model of personation. According to Hobbes’s theory, a person must have a single representative that represents the person with a singular voice. The person’s representative, on Hobbes’s account, must be authorized by a third party. This authorization is based on one of two relations: ownership (for instance, the owner of a bridge can authorize a representative because the owner has an exclusive right over the bridge) or governorship (for example, a judge can designate a representative for a ward to maintain the ward’s well-being, as in the case of a dying parent designating a guardian for their child).
“In the end, the power of ecological personhood rests as much on ideas as it does on the institutions that can sustain them.”By contrast, the Whanganui River’s personhood relies on a complex web of relations of authority, signaling, and accountability that is not fully captured by Hobbes’s theory of personhood. The authors propose that ecological personhood should be rooted not in ownership or governorship, but in a relation of authority they dub “ecoship.” For Māori, the Whanganui River is not a natural resource that can be owned or managed. Rather, it is an “indivisible and living whole;” one is a part of the river and the river is a part of one. Ecoship, Brito Vieira and Fleming write, is premised on relationships between human and non-human elements that are characterized by interdependence rather than dependence, mutuality rather than paternalism, and consideration of geological time horizons rather than human timescales.
The authors’ novel approach to ecological personhood serves as a bridge between Indigenous cosmologies and Western legal and political systems, offering useful tools for reframing our relationship with the planet. However, they note that simply reimagining our relations to the natural world is not enough. We must also invest in and cultivate inclusive, pluralistic government arrangements that are resilient against co-optation. In the end, the power of ecological personhood rests as much on ideas as it does on the institutions that can sustain them.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- BRITO VIEIRA, MÓNICA, and SEAN FLEMING. 2025. “Ecological Personhood: A Bridging Approach.”, American Political Science Review, 1–14.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.