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Paper short abstract

This study examines how more-than-human rights are assembled in environmental law through legal protection of species’ procreation. Posthuman legalities may prefigure sustainable more-than-human democracy; for others, they may be seen as threatening core mechanisms of such political systems.

Paper long abstract

This study examines how more-than-human rights are assembled in Swedish environmental law through the legal protection of species’ procreation. It asks which assemblages of procreative relations shape legal decisions and how they complicate the modern binary of legal subject and mere object. Drawing on court decisions from 2013–2024, the study traces institutional practices in which activist citizen science produces data that inform courts’ assessments of procreative conditions. Four overlapping assemblages of procreation emerge. First, assemblages of the unseen emphasise habitat and relational potentials rather than observable (or non-observable) acts of procreation. Second, opportunity and place situate procreation within ecological contexts: it occurs not only at sites but through temporal and relational conditions and interactions. Third, movements through hybrid landscapes foreground species’ mobility across fragmented and technologically mediated terrains (e.g., dams, turbines, roads). Fourth, compensatory landscapes treat procreation as a complex set of relations that can be recreated through relocation or safeguarded through compensatory zoning. While modern law largely remains grounded in a human-centred framework, jurisdictional and procedural contingencies, forest activism, and unexpected uses of species data can create ecological openings for threatened species to survive. These openings point toward relational legal understandings in which landscapes participate in recognising more-than-human legal subjectivity and rights through interspecies relations, rather than treating organisms or species as isolated units. Such inter species legalities may prefigure a necessary and sustainable form of more-than-human representative democracy in the Anthropocene; for others, they may be seen as threatening core anthropocentric mechanisms of modern political systems.