🦏 Rights of Nature
Activities
Northeast Bioregional Strategy & Intertribal Governance Framework
A draft regional regenerative strategy—Indigenous co-governance at the core—bundles restoration with food, fiber, and fuel systems, then links those to efficient buildings, clean energy, and active mobility (trails, multi-use paths). The spatial imagination is villages and cities re-embedded in larger land regeneration. Co-design with tribal and non-tribal partners proceeds under rights-of-nature framing; resources are steered toward projects that earn reciprocity with Native nations facing distinct colonial legacies.
Legal Innovation and Policy Development
The Legal Innovation Team supports Forever Sabah with strategic legal analysis—entry points in statute for a circular economy, and space to prototype policy, legal, and institutional options. It works with civil society, lawyers, and scholars to review Sabah land and environmental law, compare international models, and track relevant global processes. An initial output is a multimedia handbook on Sabah land and environmental law, with briefs summarising key laws, policies, and institutions in plain language.
Pollinator Citizenship Program
The city treated the pollination system as an active partner—an alliance that fed information back into governance. The relationship moved through three recognitions: pollinators as mediators between people and ecosystems, pollinators as agents of prosperity in both ecological and economic terms, and finally pollinators as citizens with standing in the city’s political imagination. The Pollinator Citizenship Program mapped the city from a “bee’s eye view,” cutting across ordinary public–private boundaries. Supporting pollinators required seeing the territory as one system—an archipelago of places where nectar and pollen exist—so that corridors for pollinators could run across parcels and land-tenure lines. In practice, that meant governance that recognizes non-human residents, design and regulation attentive to pollinator needs, continuous corridor-building across ownership types, and a view of the city as several overlapping systems working at once.
Dartington Charter & Dance
The UK's first River Charter was established at Dartington in 2019, which recognizes the river's intrinsic rights alongside its role in supporting biodiversity and community wellbeing. The Charter has since been integrated into Dartington's Neighbourhood Plan and local religious pilgrimage routes.