What Luhmann Can Tell Us about Rights of Nature: Conflicts of Communication in the Negotiations of Non-Human Nature´s Status As a Legal Subject in New Zealand

How can the social systems of a functionally differentiated society, which have detached themselves from their perceived environments of nature, re-establish a place for nature? An innovative way in which the legal system has communicated about nature in recent years is in the form of Rights of Nature (RoN) laws, that is, laws which endow nature or natural entities with legal rights. However, the existing literature on RoN tells us that one of the underlying issues of understanding nature as a legal subject is the way in which this status exists and moves across different societal spheres; legal, economic, political, etc. This makes it important to ask how RoN is translated across these spheres, including how meanings are altered and how that potentially instructs understandings, analyses and recommendations differently. In this paper, I argue that Luhmannian systems theory provides us with a theoretical lens through which we can productively analyse this. I then proceed to investigate parliamentary negotiations of the inclusion of nature into the category of legal subjects in New Zealand´s 2017 Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Bill - a decision presented as a way to advance both environmental justice and justice for the Māori population. Using a second-order observation approach one sees how the river´s status as a legal subject is negotiated in the light of a range of communicative logics, including political, legal and economic, and care communication. One can further call into question the attempted equation of legal communicative logics about the river´s status as a legal subject and what in parliamentary negotiations is presented as the Māori view of the river - a cluster of intimate communication, care communication, and religious communication.