Who can speak and listen to the Atrato river?

This article draws on the ethnography of a Colombian court case that led to the recognition of the rights of the Atrato River. Beyond the shift in the legal framework within which rights of nature claim to operate – from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric one – the article asks whether rights of nature also imply a shift in the expertise that the decisions mobilise. I first examine the ways in which claimants and their lawyers constructed evidence and used expertise to build this case. In a second section, I analyse the way in which the judges of the Constitutional Court contributed to this probative work by assembling expertise. Finally, I analyse the process of implementing the decision. At this stage, a double movement appears: we see the centrality of expertise in the monitoring of the judgment alongside the interweaving of heterogeneous knowledge in the implementation projects. Throughout the three stages of my analysis, I examine how different types of knowledge are mobilised, and I ask whether this process really allows us to think beyond the nature/culture dichotomy.