Insights from Antipodean legal geography: Building an environmental legal geography scholarship

Abstract

Scholarly work in the field of legal geography has grown dramatically in recent decades. While much legal geography scholarship has been influenced by a European-North American perspective, we argue that a distinctive legal geography scholarship also emanates from outside the dominant perspective. Here, we review research from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa and label this work as Antipodean legal geography (ALG). We suggest ALG research has made a significant contribution to global legal geography scholarship through an emphasis on environmental law and policy problem solving and through efforts to de-colonialise and expand legal geography’s remit.

I Introduction

In this review, we focus on examining key elements that comprise Antipodean legal geography (ALG). Antipodean legal geography makes distinctive contributions to the field of legal geography by untangling a range of messy encounters where law and people become enmeshed within dynamic, material land and waterscapes. We argue that an Antipodean perspective draws out imbricated law and people connections (Braverman, 2014) with an emphasis on the power of place-making (Bartel and Graham, 2023). We are, in our collective efforts, working towards ‘de-provincializing’ Western law (Nicolini, 2022) and our aim is to highlight ALG’s key contributions towards the global legal geography project. An Antipodean postcolonial context, for example, makes for important inquiries into the way Indigenous laws (often also labelled customary laws) have been subsumed beneath or within the dominant Westminster-based or Western-law systems. This work complements cognate work from other regions (e.g. in the edited volume of Von Benda Beckmann et al., 2009). Another perspective evident in Antipodean work looks towards environmental problem-solving, linked to key global environmental challenges relating to climate change, biodiversity loss and resource use/extraction. An environmental focus is evident in ALG research, and this informs how we define its remit and contribution, using the broad label of ‘environmental legal geography’. Questions about regulating ‘nature’, the role of ‘lore’ in land and waterscape management and investigating notions of ‘justice’ all feature in ALG scholarship. While a range of issues are explored by ALG scholars, their work reveals key insights about the human–environment regulatory and policy interface.

Importantly, ALG scholarship does not sit in isolation from global legal geography work but is inherently intertwined with it. Globally, legal geography scholarship has enjoyed a rapid and expansive period of growth. There has been extensive Euro-American authored and focused work in legal geography, often focused on the city, urban structures and planning (for selective examples, Blomley, 2004; Delaney, 2004; Hubbard, 2013). Non-Antipodean scholars including, but not limited to, Bennett and Layard (2015), Braverman (2014), Delaney (2010, 2015, 2016, 2017), Jeffrey (2019, 2020), Orzeck and Hae (2020) and Brickell et al. (2021) have provided field-leading papers, reviews and commentaries across a range of issues, pointing to a clear maturation of legal geography from its foundations. We argue that while the Antipodean perspective draws extensively on the work of non-Antipodean legal geographers, it also provides a distinctive richness that builds and strengthens the field.

Our focus is explicitly on the legal geography work from scholars based in Australia and New Zealand, the ‘Antipodes’, and we argue that this focus is particularly concerned with the material, especially the environment experienced as the natural world. This paper examines the legal geography ‘conditions’ within these locations. However, many scholars based in the Antipodes also research in the regional ‘neighbourhood’ and insights from many projects based in Southeast Asia and the Pacific also contribute directly to an Antipodean legal geography scholarship. Accordingly, we include the work of scholars based in Australia and New Zealand but who work outside these countries. Here it is important to acknowledge a very full and rich scholarship that similarly extends legal geography’s locational focus has also emerged from, and about other regions (see for recent examples, Campero and Harris, 2019; Feng and Li, 2019; Fladvad et al., 2020; Flores Fernandez and Alba, 2023; Garcia, 2022; Kelly, 2021; Loivaranta, 2020; Nicolas-Artero, 2022; Ramirez Suarez, 2023). We do not review this material here, however, but recognise that this cognate scholarship also marks an important contribution to the evolution of legal geography.

In this review, we write as Australian-based legal geography scholars who explicitly embrace a legal geography perspective in our disparate research work. We argue there are some key features that make the Antipodean perspective valuable and that these features have played a central role in advancing a broader legal geography research agenda. Our paper is structured according to four key features that underpin ALG scholarship and we present these in an emergent, hierarchical order. Our focus looks to ALG perspectives associated with environmental law problem solving, through (1) considering how ‘nature’ is conceived, packaged and managed through law, (2) unpacking the evolution of a ‘rights of nature’ influence in regulating environmental matters and (3) in showing how using a legal pluralism lens enables a critique of dominant and problematic Western law approaches, and finally by an emergent scholarship that gives priority to (4) First Nations/Indigenous law-making. Each area builds a solid, compelling ALG research agenda and scholarship.

II ALG: Advancing ‘environmental’ legal geography

What we frame as ‘environmental legal geography’ has dominated ALG work for some time and has moved the legal geography field forward in important ways. Key non-Antipodean scholars in the field have interrogated natural and environmental issues, and we acknowledge this work as fundamental to progressing legal geography (e.g. see Braverman, 2014, 2016, 2020, 2023; Delaney, 2003). Linking people and law to place draws out environmental concerns, in the broadest sense, as material land and waterscapes are formed and re-formed by both law and human influences. In this way, the conceptualisation of an ‘environmental legal geography’ has important implications for how we, in academia, think through the impact of our research. Policy-relevant research about pressing real-world concerns is a hallmark of legal geography scholarship (Bartel, 2016). In this paper, we detail why acknowledging the work of ALG scholars’ matter to any holistic assessment of progress in this field because contemporary policy issues associated with climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental problems underpin much ALG scholarship and have clear linkages to broader societal impacts. Critical insights into the ways in which environmental law becomes operationalised in localised contexts feature heavily in ALG scholarship and have helped forge a body of work we aptly described as ‘environmental legal geography’, a point also made in O’Donnell et al. (2020) and Gillespie and O’Donnell (2023) about Australian legal geography scholarship.

Much legal geography research, as with a vast amount of cognate human geography scholarship, tends to favour a case study, place-based approach, often with practical policy-relevance (O’Donnell et al., 2020). An informed understanding of the law’s material, contextual and relational dimensions is often embedded within good research design practice that has taken a reflective and critical stand on methods and methodologies. In an ALG context, various chapters in O’Donnell et al. (2020) articulate these issues. Case study-based ALG research remains a persistent force in exposing operational problems especially in environmental law by shining a light on the different ways in which law becomes operationalised (or not) in line with different place-based scenarios. Reading contested post-colonial land and waterscapes requires constant (re)interpretation, and this effort enables ALGs to inform contemporary law reform debates. Here, we provide two problematic environmental law conundrums in the form of case studies located in a complex postcolonial Australian setting: the first relating to climate change and sea-level-rise policy and the second relating to biodiversity loss through a case study of feral horse management. Each case study provides a detailed ALG approach to researching people–place–environmental regulation and demonstrates engagement with broader climate change and biodiversity challenges.

Climate change litigation has rapidly gained momentum over the past 5 years, primarily in relation to mitigation, that is, emissions reduction (Setzer and Vanhala, 2019), but also increasingly adaptation, with adaptation referring to actions that reduce the negative impacts of climate change while at the same time recognising and acting on new opportunities that arise under changing climatic conditions. Critically, adaptation involves continual adjustment of policies and actions as the changing conditions eventuate and change. Climate change adaptation litigation is often concerned with administrative decisions, usually land use planning decisions, many of which situate climate change impacts as secondary to or just the context in which the primary decision was made. The Vaughan (the 2010 litigation analysed in O’Donnell, 2016, and in subsequent claims, see Sack et al., 2020) litigation illustrates this point because the local authority had aimed to have a policy of planned retreat from a vulnerable coastal location. That location had been subject to numerous coastal erosion and flood events, and yet the land use planning frameworks were unable to effectively embed adaptative capacity. This resulted in protracted administrative litigation in which climate became key to demonstrating the importance of place in both legal and social systems (O’Donnell et al., 2019; O’Donnell, 2019c; O’Donnell and Thom, 2022). As climate impacts continue and the disasters that follow become more protracted (Lukasiewicz and O’Donnell, 2022; Simlinger and Mayer, 2019), we expect to see the complicated nature of our co-constructed legal, political, social, cultural and environment worlds challenged and, by force or by action, transformed (O’Donnell, 2019a, 2019b, 2021; O’Donnell et al., 2020). Nonetheless, following the Vaughan litigation, subsequent law reform took place via the NSW Coastal Management Act 2016 which came into force in 2018. This legislation was designed by a range of experts with deep expertise of the coastline and the range of climate impacts the coast was facing (including situations such as with Vaughan). The new legislation has helped pave the way for a range of practices seeking to embed adaptive capacity across New South Wales coasts (O’Donnell and Thom, 2022).

Antipodean legal geography scholarship continually grapples with exposing the ways in which environmental laws are problematically operationalised. One example lies in a controversy about feral horse management in a protected area within Australia’s unique alpine region, Kosciusko National Park (KNP). Management of ‘feral’ horses in the national park is controversial. Decades of research by ecologists and conservationists crafted a ‘best-practice’ approach to controlling feral horse populations with regular culling of excessive horses in order to maintain balance between all the more-than-human populations of the park. However, in response to concerns about culling of iconic brumbies (feral horses), in 2018, a new law known as the Brumbies Bill (Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018) (NSW) was introduced. This legislation directly undermined the pre-existing approach to managing feral horses in that it prioritised feral horses over the protection of the unique Australian alpine landscape, which is only present on 0.3% of the Australian landmass (Slattery, 2019). The law restrained the management of feral horse populations by limiting the use of, at times, controversial culling options. Using a legal geography approach research revealed how the law came into being and, moreover, which voices were prominent or silenced in the law-making process. Importantly, this research exposed a tension between progressive and regressive acts that have unfolded through politically charged environmental legislative changes (Hagis and Gillespie, 2021). While the unique landscape of Kosciusko National Park is home to many endangered and protected species under both state and national biodiversity protection laws, the perspectives of these threatened species were over-ridden in the enactment of the pro-Brumby (feral horse) legislation. Environmental policies and laws aimed at protecting biodiversity in this unique place were trumped by the creation of a special category of protection for brumbies (feral horses). Other scholars have also identified this concerning regressive tendency in environmental law (see Bartel and Stone, 2021). In this example, ALG scholarship reveals that there is a danger that environmental protection efforts for threatened and vulnerable species can be silenced by louder, but not necessarily widespread, voices.

A contemporary ALG environmental scholarship, which aims to better understanding concepts such as ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, has emerged over the past decade. For example, Bartel et al. (2020) grapple with the changing emphasis within Australian wilderness protection regimes in recent years and build on, and extend, work originally published in the 1970s about wilderness protection through the University of New England, NSW. This edited collection is led by an Australian-based team, and a prominent Australian-based legal geographer, and offers us the chance to challenge the dominant and often simplistic ‘fortress’ versus ‘co-existence’ narrative in conservation approaches and practices. Likewise, in another edited collection, Bartel and Carter (2021) provide a body of work dedicated to thinking through, and even beyond, a legal geography frame using a series of case studies from across the world. Each chapter within this collection gives disparate places a ‘place-agency’ (Bartel, 2017) and extends the wider law and geography project. In terms of the ALG contribution; many chapters in this collection speak to environmental issues based in Antipodean contexts (see e.g. Beck and Bartel, 2021; Carter and Paterson, 2021; Graham, 2021; Jessup, 2021; Kennedy and Holley, 2021; Nursey-bray and Mueke, 2021; Ryan and Offord, 2021; Sherval, 2021). Each chapter represents progress in the work of ALG research in showcasing law, people and place co-production.

Antipodean legal geography scholarship consistently shows how law is implicated in sub-optimal environmental outcomes by not adequately considering localised concerns and/or contexts. In the areas of resource extraction (mining), contamination and pollution adverse environmental outcomes are often exposed. In an ALG setting, key scholars lead efforts to unpack how justice can be achieved by linking people and place to the laws that impact them. For example, Sherval (2021, 2023) examines and unpacks the reactions of residents to unconventional gas proposals through a justice and equity lens in her work, while Legg and Prior (2023) look to how residents exposed to toxic chemicals (living in proximity to contamination from per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, ‘PFAS’) manoeuvre their arguments through litigation processes in efforts to seek compensation, with varying success. These examples show the entanglement of human and place dynamics in unpacking how environmental law both shapes the places we live and how the places we live potentially also shape the regulatory response (using Nagle’s, 2010 framing). Again, connections and disconnections between environmental law and regulation, people and places (across a varied material landscape) are all emphasised and explained with detail through an ALG lens (see also Della Bosca and Gillespie, 2018). While this is not unique to ALG scholarship (see e.g. the US based work of Andrews and McCarthy, 2014), ALG scholars are producing a coherent body of work that shines a light on the law’s complicity in natural resource maladaptive management (Salgo and Gillespie, 2018).

Antipodean legal geography scholarship also offers distinctive insights into the scalar aspects of environmental law’s impact, and much ALG work is inflected with an environmental justice focus. For example, Jessup (2013, 2015, 2017), in work that provides a nuanced analysis of environmental justice, invites us to both challenge and critique the application of environmental laws in their local contexts and to think carefully about the dominant US-inspired environmental justice framing. Jessup’s work explores a range of local issues occurring across Australia, including the Victorian (state government) ‘Environmental Justice Plan’ (Jessup, 2017), forest conflicts in the state of Tasmania (Jessup, 2015) and rubbish (tip) placements in the state of New South Wales (Jessup, 2013). Each study provides a grounded, critical environmental legal geography with an enticing scalability (a useful insight for scholars with a geographical leaning). A concern to understand environmental justice permeates much of contemporary global legal geography (see Delaney, 2016) and ALG scholarship (see Turton, 2015; also, Robinson and Graham’s editorial comments, 2018). Both anthropocentric and eco-centric environmental justice – or ecological justice (Schlosberg, 2014) – inflect ALG scholarship and are arguably another hallmark of ALG research. The following section considers an environmental/ecological justice trait in ALG scholarship, often associated with developments linked to a ‘rights of nature’ discourse.

III ALG and ‘rights of nature’: Beyond anthropocentrism and giving voice to the more-than-human

Environmental law protections to combat biodiversity losses are under constant review and critique due to the failure to stop the extinction crisis. The Australian continent has suffered the largest biodiversity losses of any continent in the past 200 years (since colonisation) (DECCEEW, 2023; Ritchie, 2022). Accounting for more-than-human interests to promote and protect biodiversity in environmental regulation is challenging. There is a rich tradition of work in global legal geography led by researchers such as Irus Braverman (2015, 2016, 2020) who draw detailed and critical attention to problematic animal and law entanglements. Importantly, an engagement with more-than-human interests and work which amplifying their voices has been explored by many human geography Antipodean scholars (see e.g. Gibbs, 2020, 2021). Adding to this work, ALG perspectives also articulate the need to centre the more-than-human in law and place-making analysis (see e.g. Bartel, 2020; Charpleix, 2018; Carter and Paterson, 2021; Jessup, 2015; O’Gorman, 2016). Further, and by way of example, Lange and Gillespie (2022) use legal geography as both a method and praxis (following O’Donnell et al., 2020; and akin to Jacobsen, 2021) as they analyse prescribed burning legislation and policy to assess to what extent more-than-human concerns are given priority in wild or bushfire management practices. They find that the anthropocentric grounding of current state-based laws prioritises human interests at the expense of more-than-human interests. The law-place synergy is directly implicated in both enabling and disabling more-than-human voices to be heard in shaping conservation regulations.

Law’s categorisation tendencies to both define and bracket are also evident in environmental regulation, especially in relation to plants and animals, and are increasingly problematic for the propensity to isolate through formal ‘categorisation’. In an Australian setting work led by ALGs examining the rights of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ species draws attention to problems of othering in environmental law (Bartel, 2020). Carter and Paterson (2021) present research about perceptions of dogs and cats vis-à-vis categorisation as ‘domesticated’, ‘introduced’ or ‘pests’ and in so doing they highlight the value of a legal geography lens to demonstrate how laws contradict and privilege human concerns. They aptly conclude that ‘(t)he speciest laws that privilege native over introduced species ultimately privilege the human species …’ (Carter and Paterson, 2021: 250). Law can be complicit in silencing the agency of some species over others, all often subservient to human needs. In this setting, a ‘rights of nature’ paradigm has emerged in an attempt to redress this privileging. Granting legal personhood to more-than-human interests (including entitles such as rivers) has surfaced as an alternative-to-Western view/approach for tackling environmental issues and management, or perhaps more aptly in the First Nations Australian parlance ‘caring for country’ which can include caring for ‘sea country’ (Good, 2013; O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2019; Pain and Pepper, 2021). Charpleix (2018) offers a wonderful ALG perspective on the legal recognition of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand as she traces how legal recognition of non-human (the river) evolved. Other work from ALGs in pushing research to unpack this ambitious and ‘progressive’ agenda (Kusiak, 2021) is in full swing (see Gillespie, 2020; Koch and Gillespie, 2022; Lange and Gillespie, 2022). Research that is critical of species privileging is evident in the work of both self-identified and associated ALG scholars, including Carr and Milstein (2018, 2021) and Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor (2020) who address and explore the challenges of making all species visible. Both scholars were previously based in North America but are now based in Australia and are making important contributions to ALG scholarship (see e.g. Carr, 2023).

One of the founding premises of legal geography scholarship lies in an interrogation of legal structures and the phenomenon of ‘closure’ (Blomley, 1994) in which laws are isolated from social and political processes. Unpacking the isolation process through a legal geography lens means demonstrating the messiness and complexity in how people, place and law connections are embroiled in the socio-spatial-materialities of life. Relational human geographers have made this critical shift in the past 20 years (e.g. see Panelli, 2010; Whatmore, 2002, 2006). An overt interrogation of this messiness in people, place and legal relationships is, arguably, pronounced in ALG literature in which the ‘opening’ of law and the recognition of its structural, colonial, political, economic and scalar contexts are core tenets. We suggest (above) that this is especially the case in scholarship that claims to unpack the role of environmental management and regulation (however and variously defined). Furthermore, some legal geographers have pushed this line of questioning even further, to peel back Western notions and structures of law to highlight the very different epistemological approaches to law from Indigenous perspectives. This is evident in the publication of papers about the reality of legally plural landscapes (see a Geographical Journal Special Issue ‘Legal Pluralisms, Justice and Spatial Conflicts: New Directions in Legal Geography’, edited by Charpleix, 2018; Gillespie, 2018; Robinson and Graham, 2018; Schenk, 2018 and also Schenk, 2020). Dominant modes of Western law-making and simultaneous ‘world-making’ occur through parliamentary deliberations, statute making and also from the influence of supra-national agreements such as international environmental law and free trade agreements and, for the global south, these inevitably have been passed on through colonisation processes. These dominant modes of law making exist contemporaneously and contiguously with ‘bottom up’ law or lore-making through common law, public norms, traditional and/or Indigenous and customary law, creating complex and legally plural landscapes.

IV ALG: Highlighting legal pluralism and critiquing Western laws

Legal pluralism literature directly engages with the structural assumption that law is a singular, uncontested thing. Legal pluralism is complicated by ‘uncertainty surrounding the concept of law’ (Davies, 2012: 820), a consequence, in part, of the abstractness of law and its contested, political nature. As Santos observes, the power to give one ‘form of social ordering’ the authenticity of law, while other forms of social ordering are not, is too often overlooked (cited in Davies, 2012: 821; Santos De Sousa, 2002: 91). Davies encourages scholars to ‘remain reflective about the political consequences of the choice’ (2012: 822; see also Robinson and Raven, 2020). As legal geographers, legal pluralism demands that we recognise that ‘law-creating subjects’ (Davies 2012: 825), by which we include both human and more-than-human subjects, are constantly circulating within and between multiple, dynamic and material normative systems. This results in a ‘messier’ version of the law than most Western-trained legal practitioners would want to, or could, accept with ease but has become the norm in post-colonial settings where First Nations and Indigenous (we use both terms due to differing preferences of our collaborators) customary law continues to inform conceptualisation of, and decision-making about, control of land, resources and environment. For example, Kwapena (2021) explains that in Papua New Guinea, the extended family has strong rights to the land through customary governance that is passed on by word of mouth, between generations, and which has boundaries demarcated by natural features such as rivers, forests and mountains rather than maps and fences.

The lived-in reality of legally plural landscapes means that in ALG scholarship there is a heavy focus on the impact of Western colonial structures impacting local peoples and environments (Robinson and McDuie-Ra, 2018; Robinson and Raven, 2020; Raven et al., 2021), or supra-national negotiations leading to new trade agreements or international environmental laws (Bavikatte and Robinson, 2011; Robinson, 2013). Robinson and McDuie-Ra (2018) explain the coercive imposition of Western intellectual property (IP) laws on Thailand and the varied domestic and local responses with regards to ‘piracy’ of copyrighted and trademarked goods. The authors explain the structural formation of the present-day Thailand has a ‘continental’ civil law system (since 1935), with some elements of British common law, and aspects of traditional laws like the Law of the Three Great Seals of 1805, used to govern the gradually amalgamated Kingdom of Siam (Kraichitti, 1967; Winichakul, 1994). These still influence the Thai legal system, though they have been pushed to the background behind Western norms and supra-national and trans-national influences from international laws and bilateral trade agreements. And yet, to fully understand the socio-spatial reality of how laws are implemented in Thailand, requires attention to the materialities of local customary practices and cultural acceptance (in this case through ethnography). The study found, through reflexive ethnographic methods, that coercive IP laws may achieve partial ‘closure’ but are regularly changing, contested, variably enforced and subject to existing social norms such as the ‘cult of imitation’, cultures of legal informality and a lack of social contract (Robinson and McDuie-Ra, 2018). These findings would not be identified through traditional approaches or a narrow doctrinal study of the law.

Paying detailed attention to the idiosyncrasies of place-people dynamics is a hallmark of legal geography scholarship. Attentiveness to documenting and critiquing localisation of global (Western) regulatory regimes evidences this approach. Legal geography scholars have demonstrated these challenges and shown that translating international commitments to regional and local places and conditions often has a distorting effect. Insensitivity to local conditions often means maladaptation in regulatory policy. Accordingly, a scale-sensitive regulatory approach has been recommended to deal with the complexity of, for example, operationalising global environmental commitments. To craft a scale-sensitive response, local culture, customs, norms and, critically, lores must be genuinely considered for successful implementation (Gillespie, 2018). Enabling local customs to align with overarching global regulatory targets across a range of issues is a continual policy-implementation task. In the regulation of Ramsar-listed wetlands and World Heritage protected area sites in Cambodia, Southeast Asia, a series of ALG-led studies reveal a disconnect between global environmental law obligations and local implementation (Gillespie, 2012, 2016a, 2016b, 2018). In this context, the use of an explicitly legal geography lens enables a critical examination of the people, place and law/lore dynamics of these protected area categories.

Using an ALG lens research into protected Ramsar-wetlands has revealed, for example, problematic boundary rigidity for communities living in and around wetland-protected areas in the Tonle Sap floodplain, the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia (Gillespie, 2017, 2018). Lessons from this work, which unpacks formal and informal regulatory connections to people and place-based experiences, can be used to inform policy reform for wetlands governance, especially in the Asia-Pacific region where conditions of pluralism endure (see above). Research that looks to changing environmental (including climatic) conditions (Gillespie and Penny, 2022) and asks questions about lived experiences can expose synergies and tensions in existing protected area management practice (Gillespie and Perry, 2019; Perry and Gillespie, 2019). The insights gained from exploration how global wetland protection commitments are rolled-out have revealed genuine inequities and processes of marginalisation and these revelations also then potentially enable social equity targets to be better met in reform of wetland governance approaches (Gillespie, 2020). Using a legal geography paradigm draws attention to the need for environmental regulation to be sensitive to local cultural, social, economic and political dynamics to avoid exclusion tendencies in the global roll-out of conservation programs and targets. Again, this is not a unique ALG contribution (recalling the work of Braverman, 2014, 2016, 2020, 2023; Delaney, 2003 and see also Ojalammi and Blomley, 2015), but ALG scholars have proven a body of work evidencing a solid commitment in the application of a legal geography lens to interrogate conservation practices across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

Different approaches to regulating Indigenous and traditional knowledge often present problems. One example from ALG scholarship can be found in relation to use and misappropriation of Pacific Islands plants and traditional knowledge. Ways of promoting and protecting Pacific traditional plant-based knowledges have been examined using a number of different methods. First, there has been examination of the legal geographies of plant patents using ‘patent landscaping’ to understand where researchers might be using plants and associated traditional knowledge from Pacific Island countries with or without consent and benefit-sharing agreements in place as per the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Robinson et al., 2020, 2021; Robinson, 2021). For example, the plant kava (Piper methysticum) is a culturally significant plant used in ceremonies in Vanuatu and as a relaxant following meetings and local disputes. While Vanuatu is a centre of diversity with more than 40 useful varieties, many other Pacific countries also have kava as a native plant (it is endemic to the region) and it is also often used as part of daily activities and is sometimes referred to in folklore (Robinson et al., 2021). Some 558 patent families (international patent filings) have been made, most since the year 2000 and with the majority filed in the US-by-US companies and investors (Robinson et al., 2021). Working with Pacific Island governments, it is clear that most of these researchers have not obtained permissions or set up benefit-sharing agreements for access and use of the plants for research and commercialisation. In many cases the traditional knowledge appears to be a lead towards new products, raising concerns about social injustice and misappropriation (Robinson, 2021; Robinson et al., 2021). In related work, Raven and Robinson (2022) have been developing biocultural protocols as a different kind of participatory legal geography methodology and tool. The protocols aim to use customary rules and local values to guide external parties such as researchers and companies towards more ethical engagement with communities involved in plant product trade or traditional medicines in the Pacific. They are acknowledged as a tool under the Nagoya Protocol and may be used as part of contracts and/or recognised by governments, linking people, place, culture and law (Raven and Robinson, 2022).

Antipodean legal geography scholarship, using case studies from places where legal pluralism continues, helps to shape a narrative about the need to pay careful attention to local conditions. In this scholarship, the dynamic materiality of place gives rise to active place-making (Bartel and Graham, 2023). Understanding how elements of global and local laws combine to shape a distinctive regulatory landscape has been a strong component of ALG-led work. We recognise that unpacking the ways in which layering of formal (Western-inspired) laws with customary lore takes place (Gillespie, 2018) is not necessarily a novel Antipodean approach (see e.g. Cantor et al., ’s 2020 work about changing and historical water use in Hawaii and important foundational work from Nordic scholars, such as Olwig, 2005; Jones, 2006). However, there is an important contribution from ALG work in firstly revealing problems in environmental law’s impacts and in making efforts towards improving environmental regulation in many places and secondly in researching issues that have not been the subject of more traditional legal geography inquiry.

V ALG and the de-colonisation project: Indigenous law making

Critical reflection on the complexities of law’s impacts through the lens of legal geographical analysis, as evidenced in the preceding discussions in non-Western settings, provides for valuable insights into contemporary issues. ALG scholars often turn to the work of Watson (2014), who is a key author on decolonising the Western legal tradition and Westphalian colonial aspects of international law. Her work speaks of Raw Law: a natural system of obligations and benefits, flowing from an Aboriginal ontology, Dreamings, and connection to Country (with Country holding relational, cultural and spiritual meanings, beyond just land, environment and place). It places Raw Law – derived from the earth, from Country and from Dreamings – at the centre of an analysis of colonisation – thereby decentring the usual analytical tendency to privilege the dominant structures and concepts of Western law (Watson, 2014). Understanding the broader place of First Nations and Indigenous customs, laws and belief, as sitting on the oral–written continuum and expressed through the Dreamings, provides the foundation for understanding Indigenous customary laws as they relate to the more-than-human (‘nature’, plants and animals in the normative Western sense, or Country within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ understandings). Ontologies of Raw Law, derived from Dreamings (Watson, 2014), helps us shift our thinking from Western property-rights focused on individualisation and compartmentalisation of land and the environment towards relational ontologies, kinship with the more-than-human, and ways of living with stronger connection to (and caring for) Country.

In Australia and in many Pacific Island contexts plants and animals may be regarded as totemic species, that are rights restricted and/or relational to specific individuals or families (Robinson and Raven, 2020; Robinson et al., 2021). These relational notions are often contradictory to Western concepts of property or ownership – they are instead based on longstanding connections, beliefs and lived experience. But in this regard, it is odd that common law systems that have recognised customary practice as law have often failed to recognise First Nations and Indigenous customary laws (Tobin, 2014). This suggests that it has been through deliberate colonial and political actions that First Nations/Indigenous laws have been disregarded by the state and that only relatively recently have partial measures (such as Native Title in Australia and legal personhood of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand) shown some recognition of First Nations and Indigenous customary law and relational connections to nature and Country.

One clear example of the need to account for relational perspectives is authored by Raven et al. (2021) and their paper on the more-than-human and more-than-animal geographies of the emu. The paper thinks through ways of understanding the emu as national icon in Australia; emu as totem, Dreaming-creation and law; emu as scientific animal; emu as medicine and food; and emu as oil. The article explores and explains the plural ways that the emu is perceived, defined, related to and also regulated through Western laws and Indigenous laws and relations. The paper highlights that Indigenous perspectives on the emu have been pushed to the background in the way that emus have been symbolised, used, commodified and appropriated, often through (intellectual) property laws (Raven et al., 2021). Thinking through these plural ideas of an animal – a more-than-human part of the ‘environment’ – also requires the breaking down of Western categories and the ability to conceive of the emu as more-than-animal, because of its significance as a totemic species, within kinship relations, and within spirit and Dreaming-creation beliefs. This means that understanding the regulation and relationships of the emu requires a pluralistic understanding of law – to Indigenise ‘ways of thinking’ about the emu beyond Western materialist assumptions and commodification of the species and towards ‘totemic’ and relational thinking about them (Raven et al., 2021).

For legal geographers, this often means using decolonising methodologies (Smith, 2012) or Indigenising approaches (Raven et al., 2021) and may require specific approaches such as ‘yarning’ with Traditional Owners, where they are the holders of Indigenous knowledge, and also First Nations authored or jointly authoring research. The prioritisation of First Nations voices is critical in reversing past colonial research practices (Archibald et al., 2019). This may entail writing Indigenous law stories as an approach to working with the laws of First Nations peoples, as has been applied in Māori and Aboriginal contexts (Archibald et al., 2019; Jones, 2019; Pihama et al., 2019; Watson, 2000). Such an approach should aid in de-centring the Western law focus of much law, geography and legal geography research.

Much of the work of legal geography scholarship recognises that law’s rigidity can be critiqued as it becomes imbricated into place; the rigidity of law becomes less so as it becomes both relational to, and conditional upon, place-based realities. Paying attention to the complicated real-world dynamics of law in and settled upon place demands further understanding and investigation of these processes. Today, AGL scholarship in post-colonial, non-Western settings (locations and people-place dynamics) demand further analysis and investigation: this work is only just beginning. Working with and alongside scholars researching elsewhere (outside the dominant European and North American frame), AGL scholarship is standing at the forefront of global efforts to decolonise legal geography’s remit.

VI Conclusion: ALG’s key contribution

Legal geography scholars based and working in North America and Europe have provided a strong foundation for extending both the theoretical and empirical endeavours of legal geography research. Over the past decade we suggest that an important ALG scholarship has also emerged and goes from strength to strength, particularly since the foundational work of Bartel et al., 2013; Graham and Bartel, 2016. Many of the publications reviewed herein speak to the ascendency and relevance of ALG scholarship.

We argue that ALG has made significant contributions towards environmental problem-solving largely through assessing, evaluating and critiquing the operation of environmental law and policy. As we have suggested, it has done this through building scholarship that unpacks how Western laws operate in post-colonial and non-Western places and by paying attention to on-the-ground legally plural conditions, especially through using rich case studies to describe the law and geography entanglement. It has also done so, in particular, by paying attention to how law classifies ‘nature’ and the more-than-human, and by using underlying ideas about environmental and ecological justice through to ‘rights of nature’ to evolve the nature/environment binaries that beset contemporary Western laws. We do not claim that this approach sits in isolation from efforts of non-ALG colleagues (e.g. Braverman, 2016, 2020; Cantor et al., 2020; Delaney, 2003) but argue that ALG scholarship works to complement global efforts to energise an ‘environmental’ legal geography scholarship.

Antipodean legal geography work also seeks to reinforce the notion that law cannot avoid geography. In its legislative, case law or normative forms, law always interacts with the material world and to reify law as remote or removed from the lived experiences of people and places is absurd. A geographical perspective brings situated, spatial and temporal context and is therefore central to the legal geography project. As is evident herein ALG scholars, writing as both geography and legal scholars, problematise the agency of people, the more-than-human and biophysical processes across time and space to enable a layered assessment of events or issues. Human-environmental geographers pay attention to, inter alia, scalar interactions, spatial dynamics and biophysical conditions. For ALGs the regulatory settings sharpen our focus on these holistic assessments, and we encourage environmental geographers across the globe to evaluate the regulatory dimension of environmental problem solving in line with the ALG scholarship identified herein that does just this.

Globally, legal geographic scholarship also shows us that it is imperative that we better recognise Indigenous and First Nations customary laws and Indigenous relationships with Country, which provide for transformative ‘biocultural rights’ (Bavikatte and Robinson, 2011) ways of thinking about and engaging with ‘the environment’ that goes beyond Western style management of environmental issues. Innovative ALG research builds scholarship that engages reflexively to respond to the greatest challenges of our times, including extreme disaster events like bushfires, and the adverse impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss (O’Donnell et al., 2020). Part of what makes global legal geography distinctive, and yet accessible, is its ambitious remit within the broader constellation of social sciences and its overt engagement with legal scholarly practices. Legal geography’s very core is premised on the mutual imbrication and continual re-imbrication of law and space, and now many other critical elements. Over the past decade ALG scholarship continues, and sharpens, our engagement with the material world and environmental problem-solving and encourages us to consider and critically reflect upon the remits of the law, people and place dynamic outside a (previously) dominant global North narrative. We suggest that the four elements we describe herein provide insights from an ALG perspective that work hard to contextualise the people, place, law entanglement and craft a policy-relevant ‘environmental’ legal geography scholarship which is cognisant of the more-than-human, First Nations/Indigenous laws and biocultural perspectives.