Published In

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2026

Subjects

Climate Assessments

Abstract

The Public Trust Doctrine (PTD) is a legal principle that recognizes a duty of the government to hold certain natural resources in trust for public benefit. The doctrine has been extended within the United States to address issues of water, coastal access, wildlife conservation, and climate change. Its implementation is spatially uneven and subjective, however, raising geographic questions around scale, power, and political economy. This article uses a legal geographic approach to understand the PTD. Focusing on water, wildlife, and atmospheric resources, we analyze themes of scale and jurisdiction, property and commons, and legal and environmental subjectivity. We argue that the relevance of the public trust goes beyond its utility in terms of ensuring public access and protection of resources. The PTD links human and nonhuman actors across multiple scales and sites, mediates property rights, shapes practices of commoning, and coproduces environmental imaginaries and subjectivities. The analysis attends to the important role of the legal doctrine in codifying and organizing life and space and establishing the capacities to manage socioenvironmental relationships. The PTD has played and continues to play a central role in defining jurisdictions and thereby shapes possibilities for environmental governance. Key Words: climate change, law, political ecology, water, wildlife.

Rights

Copyright (c) 2026 The Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1080/24694452.2026.2721583

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45173

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