Indigenous constitutional practices as models for ecological governance: learning from the Sumak Kawsay, Suma Qamaña and Buen Vivir movements

This article examines how Indigenous constitutional innovations in Ecuador and Bolivia are translated from constitutional text into everyday ecological governance. It develops a tripartite framework distinguishing subject innovations, who or what bears rights; jurisdictional innovations, which authorities may decide; and procedural innovations, how decisions are made. The analysis combines constitutional and documentary research with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020, including 62 interviews and observation of 27 collective events. Ecuador’s recognition of the rights of nature primarily altered the legal subject, whereas Bolivia’s plurinational framework placed greater emphasis on jurisdiction and consultation. Ethnographic cases from Napo, Cotopaxi, La Paz, Cochabamba and the TIPNIS corridor show that these provisions sometimes reshape permitting, ecological monitoring and consultation when communities retain agenda-setting authority, evidentiary capacity and enforceable suspension mechanisms. Their effects are neither uniform nor necessarily transformative at the national scale: implementation remains constrained by extractive political economies, bureaucratic centralisation, uneven institutional capacity and risks of co-optation. The article therefore characterises these constitutional processes as incomplete and contested openings rather than completed ecological revolutions.