NatureScapingTM: Advancing rights-based environmental governance through ecological stewardship, community participation, and sustainable development

Despite a global advocacy of the right to clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which strengthened the bond between environmental protection, sustainable development, social justice and human rights, a persistent gap has been observed towards environmental rights in the planning, conservation, restoration and institutional accountability. The paper develops a rights-based philosophy for environmental governance that integrates ecological integrity, environmental justice, community stewardship, participatory governance, institutional accountability, and sustainable development within a common conceptual framework, i.e., NatureScapingTM. The study adopts a qualitative conceptual research design drawing on interdisciplinary field, international environmental and human-rights instruments, and documented experience in community-based conservation, biodiversity management, ecological restoration, environmental education, and landscape stewardship. NatureScapingTM is not a replacement of the established approaches such as Nature-based Solutions (NbS), Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR), Integrated Landscape Management (ILM), Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA), One Health, or socio-ecological resilience. It complements them by positioning substantive and procedural environmental rights as an organising principle for governance. Two complementary components, the NatureScaping™ Environmental Rights Framework (NERF) and the NatureScaping™ Sustainability Index (NSI), are proposed. Whereas NERF translates rights-based principles into a governance cycle linking assessment, planning, participation, implementation, accountability, monitoring, and adaptive learning; the NSI provides a conceptual basis for assessing ecological, social, institutional, and rights-based dimensions of sustainability. Thus, NatureScaping™ presents a flexible conceptual pathway for connecting environmental rights with locally grounded stewardship and sustainable development.