A novel way of being together? On the depoliticising effects of attributing rights to nature

ABSTRACT

The recent trend of attributing rights to nature arguably introduces a novel way of ordering the relationship between humans and nonhumans. But to what extent does it challenge the political, legal, and economic categories of modernity? By analysing the processes that led to the inclusion of the rights of Mother Earth in the Bolivian legal system, I explore whether and how rights of nature express a distinct form of relating to the environment. Using the lenses of juridical symmetry and political conflict, I argue that attempts to ascribe rights to ecosystems can be read as examples of hyperpoliticisation which ultimately result in depoliticisation. I contend that rights of nature bring together the neutralisation of political conflict by extending the logic of juridical symmetry to nonhuman entities. Thus, far from constituting a renewed way of being together, these processes reiterate the aporia of the modern Western conceptual horizon.

KEYWORDS:

• Rights of nature
• depoliticisation
• juridical symmetry
• conflict
• Bolivia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Proponents of the ontological turn question the human-centric perspective on socio-environmental relationships, arguing instead for the attribution of distributed agency to nonhuman entities as a means of building a symmetric ontology in which the dominant distinction between subject and object is overcome (Viveiros de Castro 2005, Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).

2. All the texts cited in this paper were translated from Spanish to English by the author.