Sustainable Ownership - New Obligations Towards Achieving a Sustainable Society

Since 2015 there has been global consensus on seventeen sustainable development goals to achieve a more sustainable world. Sustainability is the objective, meaning a system that is diverse and productive in such a way that it is regenerative. For this to be achieved, we must substantially change the way in which we have organized our society. That includes our rules of private law, which are a fundamental element of our market economy, and especially also our rules of property law. Freedom of ownership and the free circulation of goods ensure that we are able to identify individual property rights that can be held by everyone and which can be traded on the open market.

Thinking about this is not new, but the attention that this way of reasoning is receiving in the context of the discussion on sustainability, brings old ideas, combined with new insights to the forefront. The role of law, and especially private law in this however, has not received the attention it deserves. Attention is needed because of the fundamental role private law, and especially property law, plays in the organization of our society. The central point of the law of property, and therefore also of this paper, is the right of ownership. Sustainable ownership, I will argue, means reconceptualising our fundamental philosophy at the basis of our right of ownership. The result of such reconceptualization is that the focus of ownership is not only on what the owner may do, but also what obligations he or she owes to his community.

This paper seeks to find the foundation of our right of ownership not in utilitarianism, but instead in human flourishing. It conceptually develops a framework in which obligations of ownership can be created and excercised. As sustainability is the driving force for this, the paper suggests it could be better to use planetary flourishing as a starting point including concepts from sociology – such as the social imaginary – that can help steer the transformation to sustainable property law.