From market logics to multispecies justice: reconfiguring urban environmental governance

Urban environmental governance today is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. In contemporary city planning, prevailing paradigms from market-based instruments and ecosystem-service valuation to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) promise integration and expand biodiversity discourse, but remain fundamentally anthropocentric and rooted in market-based logics. More-than-human life is managed as capital, reduced to ecosystem services or infrastructure, and nature is preserved primarily for people's benefit, yielding sophisticated forms of valuation but not transformation. This paper proposes Multispecies Justice (MSJ) as a transformative governance-oriented framework for rethinking urban environmental governance and as a radical reordering of environmental ethics and urban governance. MSJ redefines cities as interdependent collectives of human and more-than-human life, recognising non-human co-inhabitants and co-constituents that have agency and intrinsic value. It centres obligation, reciprocity, ecological agency, and care as foundational to planning, and calls for legal pluralism, participatory cohabitation, and epistemic plurality to support multispecies co-flourishing, not just resilience or sustainability. By embedding relational ontology and ecological ethics into law and planning, this paper outlines MSJ as a governance blueprint for just and resilient cities that equitably accommodate all species.