The human-nature divide in European Union environmental policy

Abstract

According to political ecologists, today's major challenge in environmental policy revolves around rethinking the ontology of the human-nature divide, which assumes "humans" to be fundamentally different from and superior to "nature", contributing to environmental and social injustices. The European Union (EU), a global normative leader in environmental policies, wields substantial influence over both domestic and international environmental agendas. However, uncertainty surrounds the EU's stance on the human-nature relationship. This article addresses the question of how the human-nature relationship is present in EU environmental policy and how it evolved over time. It offers a two-fold contribution to existing literature. First, it constructs an analytical framework to gauge the alignment of EU policy with either a human-nature divide ontology or a human-nature relational ontology. Second, it makes an empirical contribution by employing the analytical framework through an analysis of all eight EU Environmental Action Programs and the Green Deal, encompassing the period 1973-2022. The article (1) nuances unidimensional evaluations of the human-nature divide as being present or absent, by demonstrating the need to unpack it into three dimensions: why nature is protected; how people position themselves vis-à-vis nature; and how nature is perceived (2) finds that while the divide may diminish in one dimension, it can persist or reappear in others; it is hence omnipresent, but manifests in different ways (3) offers insights into how various dimensions interact to shape different policy discourses, identified as four human-nature relationship profiles.

Keywords

• Human-nature divide
• EU environmental policy
• political ecology
• political ontology