Abstract
This dissertation examines approaches to better understand and reflect how people’s values about nature, including nonhuman animals, influence environmental governance strategies for protecting nature under increasing human-driven impacts. Ethical views about nature’s diverse, plural values help to motivate the evaluation of changes to existing governance institutions across chapters. Chapter 1 provides a concise overview of the environmental challenges, frameworks, and theory of change that motivate the research, as well as a brief explanation of the fields of inquiry. Chapter 2 presents a law review article that combines legal analysis with philosophical argument to generate a new approach to animals’ rights and “personhood” in law. The chapter argues normatively that the moral value of individual sentient animals warrants providing animals with certain legal rights in the United States, which could lead to recognizing animals as “legal persons” over time. Chapter 3 presents an empirical expert elicitation of 41 experts in coastal Kenya, using interview-based qualitative coding to analyze their stated values and policy preferences regarding coral reef and reef fish conservation. Despite longstanding emphases in environmental policy on market values, the study finds that knowledge holders articulate non-instrumental values about reefs 58% of the time, resist resource-focused evaluative frames, and prefer reef conservation policies that aim to reduce extraction in reefs. Chapter 4 shows how legal institutions can move emerging rights of nature from aspirational to implementable in practice. Drawing from global examples, the chapter develops a typology of three common grounds for rights of nature across the world, and then proposes a design “toolkit” of six institutional levers that courts, agencies, and other policymakers can use to assist implementation. Chapter 5 is the conclusion, identifying cross-cutting themes and areas for further research in a broader scholarly agenda.