Rituals as Nature-Based Governance of reciprocity between people and nature

Abstract

The conventional approach to environmental governance, based on institutions, regulations, and interventions, has utterly failed to stop the current ecological catastrophe. I suggest a radical alternative: Ritual as the core mode of ‘nature-based governance’ (NBG) that enacts deep and comprehensive reciprocity between people and nature. NBG grounds governance mechanisms in embodied more-than-human practices with normative force. I combine a wide range of theoretical resources in social sciences, economics, and philosophy to suggest a general concept of ritual that is inspired by but generalizes over Indigenous thought and is informed by East Asian ideas about ritual as the pivot of social order. However, the radical basis for my argument recognizes ritual as a kind of action that humans and non-humans share as living beings. Therefore, rituals can be activated in workable governance mechanisms to create and sustain communities of multi-species cohabitation. I present a theoretical case study on property as ritual; this relates human property of land with non-human territoriality, acknowledging possession and its ritual performance as a behaviour shared in humans and non-human species. Consequently, rooted in ritual, a more-than-human notion of property emerges that radically differs from modern ideas of the institution of property but converges with Indigenous relational concepts. Equipped with these theoretical insights, I suggest practical applications in the context of NBG of Nature-based solutions. These are: reconceptualizing eco-compensation as a reciprocal ritual of gift-giving, the commoning of ecosystem services of animal populations in wildfire protection, and the formation of urban multi-species communities in urban gardening.