Literature Review

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.

Women play an important role in social activism challenging the expansion of extractive industries across Latin America. In arguing that this involvement has been largely unrecognised, this paper explores Andean Peruvian and Ecuadorian women's accounts of their activism and the particular gendered narratives that the women deploy in explaining and legitimising this activism. These discussions contribute to understanding the patterning of grassroots activism and making visible the gendered micro-politics of resistance and struggle around natural resource use, as well as to understanding the gendered and strategic ways in which women contest dominant discourses of development.

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?

In 2008, Ecuador adopted the world's first constitution recognizing the rights of nature. The status of nature was redefined to enable, ideally, legal interventions to protect ecosystems. This article examines the process through which rights of nature entered the Ecuadorian context by contextualizing the campaign to mobilize support for these constitutional changes launched by Fundación Pachamama, a nongovernmental organization close to indigenous and environmental movements. The collective action forms involved in the constitutionalization of rights of nature are approached as sites of knowledge production and contestation. Concepts from the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse are applied to reconstruct the interpretive repertoires of rights of nature advocates, a faction of the indigenous movement and the environmental movement during the constitutional reform. This analysis reveals that interpretive affinities or resemblances among the interpretive repertoires of rights of nature advocates and indigenous and environmental movements shaped and enabled the advocacy for rights of nature. Moreover, the article demonstrates that throughout the debates at the Constituent Assembly, the concept of rights of nature was stitched onto a discursive context imprinted with nationalist feelings underpinning a critique of neo-liberalism, and aspirations for legal progress and the decolonization of society.

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.

The ‘rise of ecosystem regimes’ is increasingly seen as the key for the resolution of the unfolding ecological crises that are the mark of the Anthropocene. These ecosystem regimes are seen as a crucial passage in resolving environmental law's internal contradictions and evident shortcomings. Indeed, ecosystem regimes are understood to signal a crucial step in a long progression from anthropocentric to ecocentric articulations of environmental law. This narrative, whether in normative or descriptive terms, informs much, and perhaps most, environmental legal scholarship. In this article I intend to problematize this linear narrative through an ‘analytics of biopolitics’. Situated within the critical space tentatively called ‘critical environmental law’, this approach aims at opening the field of inquiry rather than producing closures. Rather than a simplified, linear narrative of increasing interpenetration between law and ecology – a narrative where law becomes, or ought to become, increasingly ecocentric – an analytics of biopolitics transposed to the specific critical environmental legal terrain aims at outlining the slippages that intervene at the margins of intersection between law and ecology, and at articulating a biopolitical critique of both ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘ecocentric’ articulations of environmental law.