Producing juridical knowledge: “Rights of Nature” or the naturalization of rights?

Rights of Nature, the idea of extending legal personhood to nature, is today’s most prominent alternative to mainstream environmental governance. Proponents describe Rights of Nature as a grassroots movement of diverse actors opposing commodification of life and anthropocentric dualism of western thought. In Rights of Nature, indigenous cosmologies validate holistic models of life to overcome dualities of nature and humans. We argue this move enacts a paradoxical dichotomy between the West and the rest and, in so doing, treats rights as existing outside western history. In this article, we push against the image of Rights of Nature as a global consensus converging on the inevitability of rights. Applying decolonial, black feminist perspectives on historical mobilizations of rights, we ask how rights for nature becomes rights as natural. We trace individuals, institutions, and ideas associated with Rights of Nature, conceptualized as a Transnational Policy Network. We find tight linkages among a small number of actors, mostly from the global North, who draw on western holism and jurisprudence to present nature’s rights as an indigenous and natural alternative to western development. Rights of Nature is not just connected to the same ideas of nature and law it rejects, but through these connections Rights of Nature universalizes colonial modes of existence as natural.