The Legal Rights of Natural Entities: African Approaches to the Recognition of Rights of Nature

Abstract

With the growth of the ecocentric approach to protecting non-human natural entities and the increase in the number of countries granting legal personhood to non-human natural entities in different parts of the world, it is worth questioning whether this approach can be extended to Africa and shift the African approach of protecting non-human natural entities from anthropocentric to ecocentric. Therefore, this chapter applies a doctrinal research method, with the use of primary and secondary sources of materials to analyze the current African approaches to protecting non-human natural entities. This is juxtaposed with the existing approach of granting legal personhood to non-human natural entities and helps to determine how viable this concept will be in Africa.