Introducing the paradigm of complexity to the legal sciences as an approach to understanding the role of law in the struggle for socioecological coexistence.

To what extent do laws affect the capacity of human and non-human animals to coexist with anthropogenic stressors that threaten their survival across generations? Progressive legal scholars have argued extensively that modern international law  fragmenting, reductive, and anthropocentric approach to the environmental crises renders it incapable of addressing existential consequences to human and non-human life, and is in fact often complicit in enabling them. To respond to the inadeguacies of modern international environmental law to address the planetary polycrisis, authors have adopted a system’s ontology to promote large-scale regulatory interventions.  However, so far these authors have fallen victim to the same errors they try to overcome with its critiques, reiteratig failures which keep environmental governance unable to offer respond to biodiveersity loss and social injustice. In response, I present a conceptual framework informed by complexity science to address how the role of the law can be understood and empirically studied as determinant of the possibility for multispecies coexistence. In this framework, socioecological systems (SES) are viewed as made of interactions and processes which maintain interdependency and allow for coexistence. In this context of struggles for SES coexistence, the framework presents laws as enabling or limiting constraints affecting the ability of human and non-human life to respond (Response-Ability) to anthropogenic interactions which threaten their capacity to survive across generations. The framework I present is developed with the intention of having value for both legal theory and praxis, providing a research methodology for the empirical legal study of how laws can be held accountable for socioecological struggles for survival. As part of my project, I present how I apply the framework to the empirical study of how South African regulations affect the capacity of local costal communities to respond to stressors from the mining industry which is threatening their livelihoods, and the survival of diverse forms of marine life.