It is not hard to find an article or book that calls for less reductionist approaches to environmental governance, and for a greater recognition of the complexities involved. We hear that we need to move beyond simplistic discourses that favour one solution over another based on our analytical framing and associated professional affiliations. Less addressed is the question, how do we do this? This book is my answer to this question. Specifically, in the following chapters I will explore the complexities of rights-based environmental gov-ernance. The approach is descriptive, asking about what we see in the world; and it is normative, asking why things are the way they are, and if they could be or should be different. I will explore different cultural perspectives on the idea of rights to the environment, and different rights-based policies such as protected areas and market-based policies. I will discuss multiple theories of environmental property and relate these theories to a range of cases to address an ongoing challenge facing the study of environment rights – this being a lack of synthesis across numerous cases and studies, each adding a brick to a house that no one can yet see.

In conducting this synthesis I have in mind the goal to help cultivate a new kind of environmental policy expert: someone who can make sense of a situation by connecting it at once to multiple concepts and cases; who can think of exceptions to a rule and often exceptions to these exceptions; who understands the importance of clarity as well as the unavoidability of ambiguity; and who is sensitized to the multiple aspects of human nature and their own position as an actor in the spaces they inhabit. We must combine these qualities to move us toward better outcomes for the planet and its people.

Seven brothers

Several years ago, I was in a motel in a coastal Dominican fishing village in the province of Monte Cristi, close to the Dominican/Haitian border. I heard a knock on the door. It was a local fisherman who was also a local leader, a man important to the work I was doing and to the work of my local partner, AgroFrontera.