Rights of Nature? Shifting Patterns in Environmental Constitutionalism

The article outlines improvements in environment and climate protection in constitutional law and practice all over the world, examining constitutional texts, case law and constitution-like legislation. A legal standing of individuals to defend the environment is increasingly added to programmatic provisions addressed to public authorities. In some cases Nature is granted legal personality. The latter innovation connects well to traditions established in the global South, where it was introduced first, but not so to legal systems of the Occident, where it was recently introduced for the first time. In strictly legal terms the effects of this innovation can also be achieved by classical legal instruments, while its metaphoric dimension promises a change in people’s attitudes towards nature. A second innovation concerns the shift from an anthropocentric to a bio-cultural or ecocentric approach. This would render constitutional law on the environment fully effective and convey a substantive meaning to a personalised concept of Nature. Such a development is, however, uncertain. The rights of Nature risk remaining trapped in anthropocentric categories of subject and object of law when transposed to Occidental legal thinking and practice. To avoid such inadvertent contradictions, the article pleads for reconciling both approaches by seeking more equilibrium in the Human-Nature relationship.