The vision of sustainability aims at justice in a twofold, and maybe threefold sense: intergenerational justice, intragenerational justice, and – as a matter of dispute – justice towards “nature”. Sustainability policy, as public policy in general, can be interpreted as the process of modifying institutional arrangements (Bromley 1991), that is, it is about defining the structure of property rights. To advance the normative goals of sustainability and effectively tackle problems like biodiversity loss, sustainability policy may therefore need to fundamentally rethink property rights in biodiversity.
How should, accordingly, “sustainable” property rights in biodiversity be defined and designed? In this paper, I approach this question based on philosophical foundations. Following Becker, we can distinguish three levels of justificatory inquiry concerning property rights (Becker 1992: 203):
1. General: Under which conditions ought we have property rights at all?
2. Specific: What specific bundles of ownership rights ought to be allowed?
3. Particular: Which rights shall particular individuals have with respect to particular things?
In this paper, I scrutinize the justification of property rights in the context of sustainability on the first and the second level. “Sustainable” property rights in biodiversity, I argue, should be oriented towards inter- and intragenerational justice and a moral consideration of nature. A tentative answer to the question how the bundle of property rights should be designed or changed against this normative background is that diverse limitations of the bundle of rights in components of biodiversity can be justified – limitations in terms of the extent of the bundle (by excluding the right to destroy from it, for example), as well as limitations in terms of who can own the resources and how much of them can be owned by any single actor.