The Social Contract with Nature

Moderated by Assoc. Prof. Olsi Lelaj, this edition of Green Sofa opened with a broader question: can a new social pact between humans and nature be imagined in the context of ecological crisis and the modern state?

The discussion explored both the necessity and the possibility of renewing the relationship between humans and nature. Approaching the question from an anthropological perspective, it considered whether the commons might provide a foundation for more democratic forms of society, culture, and ecology, while reflecting on ways of life that secure dignity for both human and more-than-human life. The term “more-than-human,” used by environmental philosopher David Abram, describes the wider living world- animals, plants, rivers, and ecosystems- and highlights the interdependence between humans and the rest of nature.

The State, the Village and the Commons

Drawing from his extensive research in legal anthropology, common property regimes, and the relationship between the state and peripheral communities, the anthropologist and researcher Prof. Dr. Nebi Bardhoshi examined the historical position of the Albanian village and its systems of shared ownership over land, forests, water, and pastures. 

Particular attention was given to the legal and political status of the common property, positioned between res nullius and village commons. Through customary legal traditions and communal forms of governance, villages historically regulated the collective use of land, forests, water, and pastures according to principles of reciprocity, equality, and intergenerational responsibility. These practices, Bardhoshi argued, reveal alternative ways of organizing social and ecological life.

Historical records offer insight into how communities defended these rights. In 1923, the heads of Zvernec, Panaja, and Narta villages petitioned local authorities after restrictions were imposed on their fishing rights in Narta Lagoon. They argued that their community’s right of access to shared resources, such as the lagoon, was grounded in both the customary and legal frameworks of the time. Their appeal illustrates a long history of rural communities contesting concessions, privatization, and the transfer of common resources to third parties. 

The discussion traced how these tensions have persisted into the present. As development policies increasingly reshape local environments, communal forms of ownership and local decision-making have often been displaced by state-led and concessionary approaches to resource management. In this context, the village commons emerge not only as a legal category but also as a political one, expressing collective rights and responsibilities.

The River, Rights, and Environmental Justice

From the commons more broadly, the discussion turned to a particularly significant form of shared resource: the river. More than a natural asset, the river was presented as both a community resource and a common good, sustaining human and more-than-human life alike.

Rivers became a central lens through which to explore how development policies and concession agreements are reshaping shared environments and redefining relationships between communities, nature, and the state. As both ecological systems and shared social spaces, rivers reveal many of the tensions that emerge when competing understandings of ownership, development, and public interest collide. In Albania, such tensions have become particularly visible in conflicts over hydropower projects, where disputes over rivers have raised broader questions about who has the authority to decide over shared environments and how more just relationships between communities, institutions, and nature might be imagined.

Through the case of the Flym River in Zall-Gjoçaj, the conversation examined conflicts surrounding the construction of small hydropower plants and the broader consequences of extractive energy policies across Albania and the Western Balkans. The case revealed how environmental struggles are simultaneously struggles over democracy, legality, and recognition, as local communities confront institutions that frequently treat rivers and landscapes as resources to be administered rather than living environments embedded in collective memory and everyday life.

The legal arguments advanced by residents were closely connected to the existential necessity of water and to the local understandings of rights and belonging. Having relied on the river for generations, many experienced the hydropower project as a form of dispossession that severed long-standing relationships between community and landscape. Residents also emphasized that it was the community itself, often without state support, that had protected the surrounding ecosystem over generations.

The discussion further reflected on the emergence of new forms of solidarity and environmental activism organized around the protection of rivers and commons. In the case of Zall-Gjoçaj, local residents, activists, researchers, and legal advocates formed what Bardhoshi described as a "community of the river", united not through political ideology but through a shared concern for water, survival, and ecological continuity.

Through protests, legal action, public debate, and research, these movements contributed to the emergence of a broader culture of river protection. This culture rests on three interconnected dimensions: environmental rights grounded in both legislation and historical community claims; political action expressed through protest; and critical and scholarly production, alongside creative forms of activism that combine local and universal languages of resistance.

Between Development and a New Pact with Nature

The slogans used during the protest, such as “To us, you are occupiers!” and “Ecocide”, were presented as powerful expressions of the community’s confrontation with the state. As Bardhoshi suggested, such slogans function as collective cries of mourning, similar to rituals of lamentation, through which citizens grieve the loss and denial of their rights. At the same time, they reveal an anthropological interpretation of the state as an occupying force that returns to the village not to support development but to appropriate natural resources without recognizing community rights.

Similar dynamics have been examined by anthropologists studying the relationship between states, communities, and natural resources. In Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India (2022), Prof. Dr. Kriti Kapila argues that states often legitimize forms of occupation through legal mechanisms by declaring lands and resources “nobody's property” before incorporating them into state-controlled regimes. In such situations, the state appears not only as an occupier but also as an actor that violates its own legal norms through procedural irregularities or corrupt practices.

Rather than treating ecological crisis as a technical problem of environmental management, the discussion framed it as a crisis of social relations, democracy, and the relationship between people, institutions, and nature. Revisiting the commons, the village, and the river as sites of collective life, Green Sofa #4 invited participants to reflect on what kind of relationship between society and nature is being produced today, and what alternatives remain possible.

In this sense, the idea of a social contract with nature emerged not as an abstract philosophical proposition but as a practical and political question. What forms of justice, recognition, and responsibility are needed to sustain both human communities and the environments on which they depend? The discussion suggested that answering this question requires rethinking not only our relationship with nature, but also the institutions, values, and forms of collective life through which that relationship is shaped.

The conversation does not end here. Many of the ideas and questions raised during the evening are developed further in the publication Anthropology and the Commons, which offers a deeper exploration of the commons, community rights, and human-nature relations.

Assoc. Prof. Olsi Lelaj is an anthropologist and researcher at the Centre for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (QSASK) and the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies in Tirana. His research focuses on the anthropology of modernity, state formation, knowledge production, and urban transformation in socialist and post-socialist contexts. He is the author of Under the Sign of Modernity: Anthropology of Proletarianization during State Socialism in Albania (2015) and co-author, with Prof. Dr. Nebi Bardhoshi, of Ethnography in Dictatorship: Knowledge, Power, and Our Holocaust (2018).

Prof. Dr. Nebi Bardhoshi is an anthropologist and researcher at the Centre for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (QSASK) in Tirana. His work focuses on the anthropology of nature, law, and politics, with particular emphasis on customary law, common property regimes, and state–community relations. He is the author of several monographs, including Border Stones: Customary Law, Ownership, Social Structuration (2011) and An Anthropology of the Kanun (2015), and has taught legal and political anthropology for more than twenty years.

We warmly thank everyone who joined us for the Green Sofa conversation series and contributed to such an engaged and thoughtful evening. We look forward to welcoming you again at our upcoming events as we continue creating space for critical reflection and collective discussion around the cultural, social, political, and environmental questions shaping our present.