Rights of Nature and World Order: Reimagining Socioecological Futures

Abstract

Rights of Nature (RoN) have emerged as a transformative strategy to address contemporary socioecological crises. Over the past two decades, RoN have gained traction as national laws and court rulings have increasingly recognized ecosystems as legal entities, capturing global interest. While existing research explores RoN across jurisdictions, their potential to contest dominant world orders—rooted in Western, anthropocentric, and capitalist logics—remains underexamined. This article investigates how RoN both disrupt and coexist with these hegemonic frameworks by foregrounding socioecological interdependence over commodification. Drawing on critical theory, relational international relations, sociotechnical imaginaries, and Indigenous cosmovisions, we focus on Ecuador’s pioneering constitutional framework and emblematic court cases, including Los Cedros. We show how RoN challenge the extractivist foundations of liberal Westphalian state sovereignty and empower legal actions beyond human-centered rights. Yet tensions arise as RoN are becoming institutionalized through technocratic and scientific logics that risk marginalizing nonscientific knowledge systems. The Ecuadorian experience with RoN reveals ambivalences: they enable imaginaries of plural socioecological futures while remaining entangled with the epistemic, legal, and political structures they seek to transform.