Testing Ecuador’s Rights of Nature: Why Some Lawsuits Succeed and Other Fail

• In Event: New Means of Measuring the Overlap between Ethnic Identity and Environmental Conflict: Exploring Intensity of Conflicts over Extraction in the Andes

Abstract

Does granting nature rights allow a state to successfully re-define its sustainable development framework? In 2008, Ecuador became the world’s first country to grant nature constitutional rights. This resulted from pressure by Ecuador’s indigenous and social movements to implement an alternative development strategy rooted in Andean indigenous norms. In contrast to traditional approaches to sustainable development, activists sought to realize the Quichua concept sumak kawsay, translated in Spanish as buen vivir. Ecuador’s constitution presents buen vivir as a set of rights for humans and nature. Numerous lawsuits have been filed to protect nature’s rights, some successfully and others unsuccessfully. This paper examines the politics surrounding these lawsuits to identify causes of success and failure, and to evaluate whether rights for nature have enhanced sustainable development within Ecuador. Finally, the paper links Ecuador’s cases with the larger global rights-of-nature movement, which similarly advances a new sustainable development paradigm internationally. The paper analyzes the linkage between the Ecuadorian and global movements and evaluates the degree to which this linkage has impacted the evolution of sustainable development norms and policies, both domestically and internationally.

Author

• Pamela Martin