Description
The growing popularity of Rights of Nature (RoN) in international legal discourse demonstrates recent attempts to move beyond the anthropocentric understanding of environmental protection. Debates around the recognition of ecocide, UN resolutions under the Harmony with Nature agenda, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ recognition of RoN may suggest a paradigm shift. Yet, the intellectual and ethical origins of RoN lie not in international law but in Indigenous epistemologies, which conceive humans as embedded with Mother Nature and ecosystems.
The RoN framework extends legal rights to non-human beings, recognizing rivers, forests, animals and ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. In contrast, the existing international environmental law remains rooted in anthropocentric ethics, protecting nature from human use, but failing to halt global environmental degradation. Against this backdrop, RoN offers an alternative paradigm that aligns with Indigenous epistemologies emphasizing relationality, reciprocity and collective well-being.
The paper investigates whether the incorporation of Indigenous epistemologies through RoN into the international law represents a genuine structural change and biding obligations or primarily a rhetorical appropriation and symbolic declarations. To ground the analysis in empirical data, the paper will compare Indigenous-led implementations, like those by the White Earth and Rappahannock Nations, with non-Indigenous initiatives like Toledo’s Lake Erie Bill of Rights. While the former integrate RoN within traditional forms of Indigenous governance and cosmologies, the latter often lack cultural grounding.
By comparing these approaches, the paper explores epistemological and institutional differences affecting their effectiveness and legitimacy. It argues that the transformative potential of RoN depends on cultural grounding as well as institutional mechanisms that guarantee justiciability. Meaningful integration of Indigenous ways of knowing may enable international law to evolve toward more eco-centric paradigm capable of securing Mother Earth. In doing so, the paper contributes to the broader debates about the future of international order and ecological security.
