Property and Nature

• Applicant: Dr. Romy Klimke
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558433559

Is property a cause of the ecological crises or a key to their solution? Both assumptions are true. What one appropriates, how one deals with it and how one gets rid of property always has an impact on nature. This study explains the reasons for this finding and shows ways in which property can be rethought in line with the preconditions of socio-ecological transformation. Three basic questions are decisive: What can be appropriated? Who can own property? And how is the ownership relationship organised? The study is structured along these basic questions. The first part (‘Alienation and propertisation’) traces the development of the modern concept of property as a historical process of human alienation from nature and explains the resulting ideas of material domination and dephysicalisation of the property object. This is followed by an inventory of property law classifications de lege lata, especially in the German legal system with its references to European law (and, to a certain extent, international public law). Parts 2 and 3 each deal with the question of how property should be organised as an instrument for overcoming the ecological crises. Of particular interest in Part 2 (‘New and Well-established Alternative Property Structures: Against the Abandonment of Property and the Right to Abuse’) is the current trend in various legal systems around the world to assign property rights to nonhuman elements of nature, thereby paving the way for cross-species property regimes. The third and final part (‘The obligation of the use of property to nature’) is devoted to the question of an ecologisation of the use of property. Article 14(2) of the Basic Law provides a special lever for to strengthen the ecological function of property. Methodologically, this habilitation thesis pursues an approach that attempts to embed the jurisprudential investigation in an interdisciplinary manner by linking it to other so-called property sciences (history and economics as well as philosophy, sociology, theology and ecology).

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants