About

Since Ecuador recognized “mother earth”, or Pachamama, as a subject of rights in its constitution in 2008, “rights of nature” have emerged as a globalized topic for legal research. A bourgeoning academic literature has come to consider rights of nature as a new ecocentric legal paradigm rooted in indigenous cosmologies Adloff/Busse 2021; Corrigan/Oksanen 2021; Gutmann 2021. This new form of ecocentric normativity has been praised as “a legal revolution that could save the world” from environmental crises, ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss Boyd 2017. As rights of nature are thus increasingly incorporated into legal practices and activism around the world, including in Europe see e.g. European Parliament 2021; Gutmann/Ewering 2021, they are hailed as a legal innovation originating from the Global South, reversing the typical direction of legal reception and transplantation Bonilla 2019 and forming something akin to a “Global Movement” Goeckeritz et al 2018.

Despite this global interest and enthusiasm, however, there remain important gaps in our understanding of ecocentric normativity, as the existing literature tends to focus on doctrinal developments and implications for legal theory. Hence, there is, firstly, not much in-depth comparative work on rights of nature across jurisdictional boundaries, let alone across different communities, in particular indigenous groups. The question remains then whether rights of nature actually represent one “global movement”, or whether there are important differences in concepts, functions and contexts that require a more nuanced, contextualized understanding of the phenomenon. Secondly, the actual social practices and political complexities associated with rights of nature on the ground are still less well understood. What changes (or not) in social reality when nature turns from an object to a subject of rights? Who invokes rights of nature in specific cases, and who benefits from it? And, most importantly, perhaps, whose views are ultimately counted to define the rights of non-human entities?

The Amazon fo Rights project (AoR) aims to understand how ecocentric normativity interacts with social realities in an important ecosystem of planetary relevance, namely the Amazon. The Amazon is a transboundary river system that crosses the jurisdictional boundaries of four national legal systems and of distinct indigenous territories. When it crosses the national borders, its legal status changes. In Ecuador, the tributaries to the Amazon enjoy the status of a rights bearing entity by virtue of the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008. In Peru, where the main tributaries meet to form the Upper Amazon, the river reverts back to what nature has been for most of the time in Western legal systems: an inanimate object of legal regulation and of human property rights. This changes again when the river straddles the border with Colombia, where the Supreme Court declared in 2018 that the Amazon is a legal subject with rights, only to lose this status again upon entering Brazil and making its long way to the ocean. This project explores this ebb and flow of rights in and of the Amazon, inquiring how ecocentric normativity shapes, and is shaped by, social practices and legal imaginations of local communities, indigenous peoples, activists and legal practitioners. Understanding these multi-facetted practices and imaginations requires not only analysis of state constitutions and legal systems, but also observing everyday practices, legal cultures and oral knowledge traditions of riverine populations, especially of the multiple indigenous peoples that live along the course of the river. While indigenous peoples along the Amazon have long believed that nature is a living being, not all of them subscribe to the idea that nature has “rights”; indeed, many of them perceive the notion of “rights” as such as foreign to their own cosmologies, and the global fascination with rights of nature sometimes contributes, wittingly or unwittingly, to romanticizing, exoticizing and objectifying the indigenous populations to whom the concept is attributed Tănăsescu 2020; cf. generally Berman 1997; Frankenberg 1985.

Capturing these complex interactions between ecocentric normativity and social realities poses difficulties for traditional comparative law scholarship. The project thus proposes to rely on ethnographic methods, and especially visual ethnographic practice and documentary film. While legal academics are used to desktop research and text production, anthropologists have embraced visual ethnography as a valuable form of collecting primary data in more oral contexts and community settings Pink 2007; Pauwels 2015. This approach is particularly useful for research into non-state normative orders, such as those related to indigenous or riverside peoples, whose legal systems are often conveyed through oral traditions. Ethnographic documentary film arguably represents a form of legal research particularly attuned to the contextual specificities of ecocentric normativity and its social realities. This approach also addresses gaps in the anthropological study of rights. Legal ethnography, more generally, has had a long focus on the social life of human rights and advocacy Merry/Goodale 2007; de Feyter et al. 2011. But although there have been efforts to critically explore the connections between visual ethnographic practice and law in colonial and postcolonial settings Eslava 2014, 2018, legal and visual ethnography have not been brough to bear on issues around eccocentric normativity in transnational plural contexts. While documentaries about rights of nature exist Goeckeritz et al 2018, they do not engage with the actual social practices that articulate and enact ecocentric normativities.

To reach its aims, the AoR will form an international and transdisciplinary collaborative network that brings together legal scholars, political scientists, legal anthropologists as well as ethnographic filmmakers and local stakeholders from the Amazon region. The collaborators will address the research questions through a combination of desktop legal research, joint workshops, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, documentary film and semi-structured interviews with activists, indigenous leaders and academics in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. Besides academic publications, the output of the project will also include video and photographic essays and an ethnographic documentary film (45mins aprox.) addressed to broader audiences. Outputs will be designed to be used for science communication, teaching purposes and legal and public policy debates. An original transdisciplinary research collaboration producing an impactful form of science communication.

The core team is composed of Michael Riegener (University of Erfurt), a legal scholar from Germany specialising in comparative law, Cecilia Oliveira (RIFS Potsdam), a political scientist from Brazil versed in the politics of the Amazon, and a legal anthropologist Luis Eslava (La Trobe University) from Colombia, with extensive experience in community engagement, ethnographic research and filmmaking in Latin America.