Post-anthropocentrism and Rights of Nature

From Constitutional Utopia to Constitutional Jurisprudential Concreteness, or the End of Utopia?

Abstract

This article outlines a contextual approach to the environmental crisis known as the “crisis of our time”, and highlights that, in the face of neoliberal hegemonic recomposition, environmentalist and socio-ecological perspectives are being strengthened in a post-anthropocentric key. An emblematic achievement of these is the subjectivization of nature, i.e., its recognition as a subject with rights, and that is reflected for the first time at the planetary level in the Ecuadorian Constitution enacted in 2008; in the Bolivian laws of 2010 and 2012; with nuances in the Colombian Constitution of 1991, and in the so-called Peruvian Ecological Constitution of 1993. The analytical framework alludes to the philosophical-ontological understanding of nature from a systemic perspective, and an empirical study of four sentences related to the realization of the rights of nature and dictated by the high courts of Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, indistinctly, is developed. A relevant objective is to note that without constitutional jurisprudence that protects the realization of the rights of nature, the subjectivation of such rights runs the risk of remaining an ideological-political utopia. The research strategy is based on the application of the so-called multiple case study method.