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The European Union’s constitutional framework attempts to balance economic growth and market integration with sustainability, social justice, and democracy. Yet these aims often clash. Ecological economics shows that continued growth is difficult to reconcile with environmental protection, and scholars have pointed to planetary boundaries as limits to sustainable development. At a deeper level, terms like “nature” and “environment” have become politically contested, revealing a deeper failure to rethink the relationship between human and non-human worlds. This raises key questions about whether the EU’s legal architecture can truly support a transition to a just, resilient, and ecologically sound society.

Project RICE (Reimagining Constitutional Ecology) explores the EU’s constitutional, legal, and conceptual structures, identifying their limitations and exploring pathways for transformation. It draws on interdisciplinary insights from law, economics, philosophy, history, and climate science, to imagine new foundations for a sustainable future.

HUB 1: Ecological constitutionalism through citizens’ councils

Timeline: First half of 2026

Focus: Developing bottom-up approaches to ecological imagination and democratic participatio

Activities:

• Organizing two Ecological Citizens’ Councils in collaboration with partners in Belgium, Italy, and Norway.

• Facilitating dialogue between citizens and experts in history, law, economics, philosophy, and environmental science.

Goal: Foster participatory governance and explore how citizens view environmental rights and responsibilities, contributing to a new constitutional vision grounded in the rule of law and sustainability

HUB 2: Buen Vivir and sustainable circularity

Timeline: Second half of 2026

Focus: Exploring alternative, eco-centric visions of the ‘Good Life,’ inspired by indigenous and Latin American concepts such as Buen Vivir.

Activities:

• Hosting two seminars on themes like dignity, non-discrimination, and responsibility toward nature.

• Accompanied by artistic performances (e.g. theatre, dance), to inspire the imagination of alternative legal structures.

Goal: Encourage public reflection on sustainable and inclusive lifestyles, bridging philosophy, law, and creative expression.

HUB 3: Interdisciplinary Academic Seminar

Timeline: Late 2026 to early 2027

Focus: Synthesizing insights from Hubs 1 and 2 and preparing an interdisciplinary edited volume

Activities:

• Launching a call for papers.

• Organizing a scholarly seminar with national and international academic partners.

Goal: Produce an academic publication that contributes to the emerging field of constitutional ecology from multiple disciplinary angles.

HUB 4: Creative dissemination of ecological constitutionalism

Timeline: 2027

Focus: Communicating the project’s findings through creative and accessible formats.

Activities:

• Policy briefings for EU stakeholders.

• A public exhibition at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Museum, featuring:

  • Visual material (photos, videos)

  • Dance and poetry performances led by a professional choreographer and involving both the project team and the public.

Goal: Promote impact through public engagement, artistic expression, and policy influence.

Time presents both a challenge and an opportunity for constitutional reform. The EU’s current framework prioritizes short-term interests and political cycles, which are ill-suited to long-term ecological and climate challenges. Project RICE explores how constitutions can embed long-term thinking and intergenerational justice through legal mechanisms and bottom-up citizen forums as tools for ecological listening and practice. It also draws from early societies and alternative European environmental knowledge to reimagine human–nature relations beyond dominant legal paradigms.

Value(s) refers to the guiding principles of policy. While human dignity is central, the EU’s market-driven growth model often undermines it by subordinating ecological and social concerns. RICE critiques this commodification of nature and proposes alternative constitutional principles grounded in relatedness and ecological well-being.

Relationships & Responsibilities argues that rights-based dignity alone is insufficient for environmental justice. Dignity must be understood through reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world. RICE explores how constitutions might institutionalize responsibility, stewardship, and solidarity to ensure justice for all life forms and future generations.

On Friday 6 December 2024, the RICE-project on ‘Reimagining Constitutional Ecology’  held its first workshop, focused on Time, where archaeologists, historians, political ecologists, legal scholars reflected on how our perception of time may inform our current and future approaches to circular and sustainable policies.

After the opening of the workshop by Sybe de Vries, professor of public economic law at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� and one of the initiators of the RICE-project, Guido Furlan, a postdoctoral researcher and archeologist at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Padova, kicked off by offering an extremely fascinating and insightful overview of patterns of sustainability in ancient Roman towns. Archaeological research reveals that recycling and reuse of various products, from textiles to glass, was widespread across the Roman empire. ‘Waste nothing’ was the guiding motto, focusing on care, maintenance and repair of goods. The Romans combined a linear economic model with a circular economy.

Irene Bavuso, a historian and assistant professor at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� then shared her thought-provoking views on economic circularity at the early middle ages, the period just after the fall of the Roman empire. She started off by contesting the assumption that economic circularity in ancient, premodern times should be associated with decay and decline. As was also highlighted by Guido Furlan, recycling and reuse were particularly widespread in flourishing economies. Irene mentions three reasons for economic circularity in the premodern world, which are ideological and symbolic, religious, and personal and family related. But, although we cannot deduce from archaeological sources or historical evidence that there was a general and shared idea of sustainability as a principle of policy, there were, for sure, sustainable practices in premodern societies.

Janna Coomans, a historian and assistant professor at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��, briefly reflected on the presentations by Guido and Irene, and observed the vast continuity of repair, recycling and reuse practices over the course of centuries until only very recently, when single-use products (quite suddenly) became a dominant choice.  In that respect, the experiences from the past are indeed an inspiration for how we could deal with the imminent ecological challenges in our current societies.

Josephine Chambers, a transdisciplinary social scientist and assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio, Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��, then briefly focused on the future and explained how ‘we tug at threads of particular histories and futures to reduce the making of our present’ (quoting Julio Cortázar). One theme in her research revolves around the visualization of multi-temporal futures.

Concluding remarks presented by Sybe de Vries as to how the sustainable practices in the past, premodern societies can help us to critically reflect on the current EU’s legal approach to sustainability. A number of legislative measures have meanwhile been adopted at EU level with a view to foster circular and sustainable practices and to transition the EU’s economic, like the Ecodesign Regulation, the Right to Repair Directive or the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, or the changing waste (management) policies.

On 2 April 2025, the RICE-project held its second workshop, (2 April 2025) tackled the concept of dignity from the perspective of Indigenous legal and ethical traditions, challenging its anthropocentric roots within European legal thought.

Carolina Sánchez-De Jaegher (UU - Languages, Literature and Communication) argued that dominant Western understandings of dignity, as enshrined in instruments like the EU Treaties and the ECHR, implicitly reinforce human exceptionalism and thus limit the potential for truly ecological constitutionalism.

Drawing on Southern epistemologies and Indigenous legal frameworks, Sánchez-De Jaegher proposed alternative value systems rooted in relationality, land ethics, and nonhuman agency.

Margherita Paola Pohto (UiT The Arctic ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Norway) responded with reflections grounded in Sámi legal traditions, emphasizing the need to resist the epistemic exclusions perpetuated by colonial legacies in legal scholarship.

This workshop illuminated the extent to which key legal concepts must be re-interpreted - if not reimagined entirely - through intercultural and ecologically grounded dialogue. It also underscored the risks of perpetuating exclusionary structures within academic and policy discourses unless Indigenous and non-Western traditions are meaningfully engaged.