The need for a new regulatory approach for the promotion of ecological sustainability

This chapter examines how state sovereignty can be reconciled with trusteeship. The environmental crisis and the state of the global commons give rise to the need for revisiting the relationship between sovereignty and trusteeship. The only way to turn things around and move international law from the Westphalian conflict model to a twenty-first-century cooperation model is to re-define states as trusteeship organizations. That state sovereignty is fundamentally a trust relationship cannot be dismissed as a Western ideal. Legal ownership means control and power, but a lot depends on whether land is owned individually or collectively and whether ownership involves obligations of care and stewardship. A particularly powerful form of applied stewardship ethics is to claim legal ownership over the commons, in particular the global commons. The idea of global nature's trusts has been promoted by environmental lawyers Mary Wood and Peter Sand or economist Peter Barnes. © 2016 Laura Westra, Janice Gray and Antonio D’Aloia, selection and editorial material; individual chapters, the authors