The Rights of Nature in Ecuador

Abstract

In this chapter I want to start discussing the practice of the rights of nature by looking at what has become its paradigmatic example to date: the 2008 constitution of Ecuador. Besides the wide publicity that the rights of nature provisions in this constitution benefitted from, they also enjoy the status of paradigmatic for being the first constitutional rights. So far we have analyzed the theoretical building blocks of the notion of rights predicated of nature. Here, I want to start analyzing how the theoretical foundations laid so far help us understand what goes on when people actually opt for giving nature rights. In order to achieve this goal, this chapter will detail the context and background of the 2008 constitutional rights of nature, in order to achieve several things. First, it is important to see what nature’s advocates themselves claim the rights of nature are supposed to do, what they mean, and where they come from. Second, the Ecuadorian rights of nature contain elements that are not unique to the Ecuadorian experience, but rather shared by all rights of nature practice so far. This, as I will explain, is not incidental; there are deep reasons for why the rights of nature share a similar advocacy account across several implementation strategies. Lastly, in order to be able to see what the theoretical framework we have advanced reveals about the rights of nature, we have to first attend to how they are always highly dependent on political processes.