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Governments around the world are adopting laws granting Nature rights. Despite expressing common meta-norms transmitted through transnational networks, rights of Nature (RoN) laws differ in how they answer key normative questions, including how to define rights-bearing Nature, what rights to recognize, and who, if anyone, should be responsible for protecting Nature. To explain this puzzle, we compare RoN laws in three of the first countries to adopt such laws: Ecuador, the US, and New Zealand. We present a framework for analyzing RoN laws along two conceptual axes (scope and strength), highlighting how they answer normative questions differently. The article then shows how these differences resulted from the unique conditions and processes of contestation out of which each law emerged. The article contributes to the literature on norm construction by showing how RoN meta-norms circulating globally are infused with differing content as they are put into practice in different contexts, setting the stage for international norm contestation.

This article explores the saga of the campaign to save the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) block of the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador's Western Amazon, a story of the complex transnational networks and global governance mechanisms that have emerged to create post-Kyoto solutions for the planet. Ecuador's Yasuní-ITT Initiative to keep nearly 900 million barrels of oil underground in exchange for global contributions for avoided emissions presents an alternative norm for global environmental governance in line with the indigenous concept of buen vivir, or the good life. This means living in harmony with nature, and is embodied in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008. These changes, however, are not without pressures and inconsistencies at the domestic and international levels. Ultimately, the Yasuní-ITT Initiative and subsequent UNDP Yasuní Trust Fund offer replicable models for other fossil fuel dependent and megadiverse countries in the developing world. © 2011 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How Rights of Nature laws are transforming governance to address environmental crises through more ecologically sustainable approaches to development. With the window of opportunity to take meaningful action on climate change and mass extinction closing, a growing number of communities, organizations, and governments around the world are calling for Rights of Nature (RoN) to be legally recognized. RoN advocates are creating new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights, and appealing to courts to protect those rights. Going beyond theory and philosophy, in this book Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin analyze the politics behind the creation and implementation of these laws, as well as the effects of the laws on the politics of sustainable development.  Kauffman and Martin tell how community activists, lawyers, judges, scientists, government leaders, and ordinary citizens have formed a global movement to advance RoN as a solution to the environmental crises facing the planet. They compare successful and failed attempts to implement RoN at various levels of government in six countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, India, New Zealand, and the United States—asking why these laws emerged and proliferated in the mid-2000s, why they construct RoN differently, and why some efforts at implementation are more successful than others. As they analyze efforts to use RoN as a tool for constructing more ecocentric sustainable development, capable of achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development goal of living “in harmony with Nature,” Kauffman and Martin show how RoN jurisprudence evolves through experimentation and reshapes the debates surrounding sustainable development. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.