Description
The UN Secretary-General’s report Our Common Future, proposed 12 key principals for consideration when deliberating and striving for a fairer future, these principals being couched within four broader organising frameworks. These targets are further supported by the more recent 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that has resulted in the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) taking the initiative Space4SDGs. The core mission of UNOOSA aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals that space should only be used for peaceful purposes and that the benefits of space should be for the whole of humanity. But recent years have seen a growing interest in – and interaction with – Outer Space by an increasing number of State and non-State actors. Each of these actors (re)produce their own discourses and future imaginaries to advance their respective operations and recent years have seen a growing number of those advocating for the enclosure and privatisation of Outer Space.
Consequently, the principals and frameworks outlined within sustainable development and international environmental laws provide a timely provocation for contemporary deliberations on Outer Space. They ask us to consider notions of governance, ownership, and equity, along with deeper questions of societal structures and values at a time of intensifying interactions with Outer Space and its attendant futurity. This paper thus seeks to deliberate how the principals of international environmental law and sustainability laws may apply to Outer Space, whether they go far enough, and how and by what means a just Outer Space futurity may be achieved.
