Literature Review

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to make nature a subject of constitutional rights, and they did so by invoking nature as la Pachamama, the Kichwa Mother Earth deity. This is a biocentric notion which challenges the modernist vision of nature as resources subject to human use, which could imply a fundamental transition in the human-nature relationship with implications far beyond the legal system. With this point of departure, the aim of this article is to explore how Ecuador’s rights of nature are understood and employed rhetorically by relevant actors, particularly in relation to the country’s development model, which is based on extraction and export of natural resources, i.e. a subject understanding of nature. The rights of nature’s meaning have been attempted fixed in a discursive struggle, and three different discourses regarding the rights of nature have been identified from interview data: The Anti-Capitalist Ecologist Discourse, the Transformative Discourse and the Anthropocentric Developmentalist Discourse. The latter, which conceptualizes the rights of nature as anthropocentric sustainable development has become hegemonic. This can explain why the rights of nature can co-exist alongside continued and increased resource extraction with detrimental socio-environmental effects.

The concept of development and the ways of achieving it have been widely criticised from various viewpoints. In the face of the apparent obsolescence of long-standing models, the novel Buen Vivir approach (roughly translated as ‘living well’ or ‘good living’), which has arisen in different parts of Latin America, may offer an alternative paradigm. However, the implementation of policies that could lead to this Buen Vivir model requires profound changes that follow a range of complex transitions, which may often even seem contradictory in countries like Ecuador, where this approach has already been enacted in the new constitution and laws but where old development practices still continue. Accepting the plurality of visions on Buen Vivir (from the indigenous ontology to the ‘Western–modern’ approach), while at the same time positing common ground in which to define a new development strategy able to overcome a natural resource extraction-based economic pattern, is one of the immediate challenges.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation to grant constitutional rights to nature, or pachamama (Mother Earth to many indigenous Ecuadorians). The prevalence of laws granting rights to nature has dramatically increased in recent years at local, state, and national levels. In the United States, approximately 200 municipalities have passed ordinances that grant rights to nature in some manner. This movement was substantially catalyzed by Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. Granting rights to nature shows a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of law. Nearly all legal systems were designed only for the benefit of people. Property law, in particular, was built on the premise that the modification of the natural environment for human benefit should not only be acceptable, but incentivized. John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government provided the foundation for the labor theory of property, which establishes that in a world given by God to all of humanity in common, individual property ownership of any specific aspect of that world should be based on the labor that the individual puts into utilization of natural resources for human benefit. Similarly, traditional environmental law is largely based on protecting the rights of people to have the benefits of a healthy environment and the resources it provides. Even the Endangered Species Act, which was enacted for the sake of protecting species, states in its text under the section, “Findings, Purposes, and Policy,” that endangered species are of “esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people,” highlighting that its purpose is, at least officially, anthropocentric. Granting rights to nature is a new approach to environmental law that conceptualizes the natural, non-human world as something worthy of protection for its own sake, and not just as something to be used for the benefit of people. While a great deal has been written by scholars theorizing about what the effects of granting rights to nature might be, it is difficult to find information about how Ecuador’s law has actually been used in legal practice. To help fill this gap, the emphasis of this Article is on analyzing how nature’s rights have been utilized and implemented in Ecuador, and what effects they have had. A final summary of key takeaways and lessons learned, that might be relevant for other rights of nature jurisdictions, is provided.

The purpose of this article is to understand, from the perspective of the Bolivian Aymara identity of Bolivia, the intrinsic relation these persons have with Nature. This task is developed through the study of what they call Pachamama (sacred Mother Earth), which is part of their identity as an ‘all interrelated whole, the Suma Qamaña or Good Living’, and which can be considered a non-Western epistemology. Their worldview breaks with the Western (anthropocentric) conception of environment that informs European and AngloSaxon continental law, and that is currently predominant in international standards of reference. Proponents of this perspective achieved a transformation in the international treatment of Nature, recognised by the United Nations (Resolution 63/278 of 2009, promoted by the Bolivian State), gaining inspiration from the inclusion by Ecuador of Pacha Mama (Nature) as a subject of rights in its constitution (2008).

The aim of this paper is to analyse the environmental policies implemented in Ecuador in the period from 2007 to 2013. According to the Ecuadorian Constitution these policies must be based on the promotion of the sumak kawsay or well-being, which promotes harmonic relations between human beings’ activities and the Pachamama or Mother Nature. From the theoretical perspective, this approach is related to biocentrism and the super strong sustainability. But in the real world, the Ecuadorian Government has failed to implement a long-term strategy for protecting the Pachamama, because it is not easy to forget the social and economic necessities of its citizens. Anyway, this interesting experience gives us an important alternative which is the Net Avoided Emissions (NAE). This mechanism is closely linked to the concept of super strong sustainability and biocentrism that criticises the global carbon market

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to constitutionally adopt Nature’s rights.The concept of RoN has since seized the world’s imagination, with Ecuador’s early and bold adoption exalted by environmental groups. Nature’s rights are now recognised in various forms in thirty-nine countries. However, RoN is still an emerging field of research. Studies largely focus on analysis of the Nature’s substantive provisions without examination of their application through procedural rights, institutional development and policy. Although research often discusses the legal outcomes of individual cases, environmental outcomes are left mostly unaddressed. Where analysis exists, it often does not situate outcomes within their larger political and economic context, focusing only on questions of law. The paper aims to ameliorate these gaps by linking theory with practice through empirical comparative analysis of the impact Nature’s rights in Ecuador. The research will examine the question: what is the strength of Nature’s rights implementation in Ecuador and what has been the impact of their legal adoption? The paper will assess the strength of RoN fulfillment in Ecuador and attempt to quantify the impact of implementation on normative and environmental outcomes. Barriers identified will then be explored and contextualised and some solutions offered. It is hoped the paper will enable future research to establish conditions required for successful RoN implementation in order to aid international replication.

In 2017, multiple claims and declarations from around the legal world appeared to signal a tipping point in the global acceptance of a new and evolving legal status for nature. Whether it was litigation in the United States, India, and Colombia, or legislation emanating from New Zealand and Australia, the law seems to be grappling with a new normative order in relation to the legal status of nature. However, this shift has been a long time coming, being at least fortyfive years since Christopher Stone famously asked whether trees should have legal standing. This Article explores what this emerging Ecological Jurisprudence means for the legal personhood of rivers. Nature, the environment, and even single complex ecosystems, are seldom easily quantifiable as bounded entities with geographically clear borders. Within the complex spectrum of establishing where a legal subject ends and another begins, however, rivers are more easily identifiable. A river’s very being is premised on historicized boundaries that measure its watery ambit from riverbed to riverbank. Still, rivers elude a final, clearly defined, and uncontroversial description. As a result, they inhabit a liminal space, one that is at the same time geographically bounded, yet metaphorically transcendent, physically shifting, and culturally porous. Drawing on comparative case studies from Ecuador, Colombia, India, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia, this Article explores the deep and often murky bond of the river and us. This relational, ancient, and ultimately environmentally urgent bond forms the prism through which the rich story of legal personhood, ontological change, and the consequential nitty-gritty of river governance is told. Indeed, this complex story is best heard through the metaphor of song, since “[i]f we are to take metaphor seriously, we must explore its poetic dimension, the persuasive power of its rhetoric, coupled with its aesthetic appeal.” In seeking to discern a river’s legal personality, we ask, can we hear the rivers sing?

Ubuntu has launched the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development, 2020–2030. This commentary stipulates how ubuntu can reinforce the Pachamama rights and its significance to social work practice. The African philosophy of ubuntu has potential to enhance the framework of understanding environmental rights from an eco-spiritual social work perspective and integrating the concepts of Pachamama rights. Clearly showing the link between Pachamama and ubuntu, this paper reminds social workers to advance the Rights of Nature.

Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting evidence from Earth system science regarding anthropogenic forcing on the planet. It does so through a policy analysis of annual UN reports, resolutions, and dialogues with international experts. Situating Harmony with Nature in the broader intellectual heritage of Earth jurisprudence and contemporary efforts to address anthropogenic forcing on the Earth system in the Anthropocene, I argue that Harmony with Nature operates at the juncture of two powerful ways of ordering relations, knowledge, and obligation: kin and system. The critical analysis shows how a new geography of global environmental governance has been produced within the constraints of the UN precisely by scaling Indigenous kinship to the planetary diagnoses made by system-based planetary sciences. The resulting form of Earth jurisprudence in Harmony with Nature holds important, cautionary lessons both for understanding how Indigenous legal traditions are made to comport with UN sustainable development programmes and for contemporary efforts to transform governance to meet the pressing demands of global environmental change.

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.

The concept of “biophilia” describes humans’ successful evolutionary adaptation to the natural world and our continuing need and love for access to nature. For human health and mental well-being, this affinity requires maintaining and nurturing a daily connection with nature. With this in mind, the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture aims to illustrate and promote the abundance of nature in cities.The world is rapidly becoming more urbanized, and by nurturing nature in cities, we can ensure that nature is present and accessible in the places that people increasingly reside. As one piece of the larger Biophilic Cities Project (“the Project”), this article surveys legal mechanisms that aim to improve the abundance of nature in cities. This article’s purpose is to assist members of the Biophilic Cities Network in recognizing, conserving and enhancing nature in their cities by providing real-world examples of particular legal mechanisms adopted by representative North American cities. This article is by no means an exhaustive list of the laws that are enhancing the abundance and accessibility of nature in cities, but instead only scratches the surface. To facilitate this survey, I identify broad categories of nature in urban spaces and provide an introduction to the legal approaches used by some cities.