RoN scholarship often invokes shifts in environmental legal philosophy, but key terms are not always used consistently. In this review we use: Anthropocentrism to describe legal frameworks that protect the environment primarily to safeguard human welfare (e.g., a human right to a healthy environment). Biocentrism to denote approaches that attribute intrinsic value to living beings and emphasize intergenerational stewardship, often expressed through sustainable development and biodiversity protection, without necessarily treating ecosystems as rights-holders. Ecocentrism to describe approaches that treat ecosystems and ecological processes as having value in themselves and that recognize nature (or specific ecosystems) as rights-bearing subjects.

RoN is frequently conflated with legal personhood. Legal personhood is a juridical status that enables an entity to hold rights and duties and to appear in legal proceedings (directly or via representatives). RoN recognition, by contrast, is defined here as the articulation of substantive rights attributable to nature (or an ecosystem), such as rights to exist, maintain ecological integrity, and be restored. Personhood can be a vehicle for RoN, but personhood alone does not determine the content, enforceability, or institutional embedding of nature’s rights.

Because ecosystems cannot represent themselves procedurally, RoN frameworks depend on guardianship/representation arrangements. We differentiate four recurring models in the literature and cases analyzed: (i) Co-governance boards with state and Indigenous/community representation (e.g., New Zealand); (ii) Community guardian councils created by courts or statutes (e.g., Colombia’s Atrato case); (iii) State-official guardianship (ad hoc appointments of ministers or public officials, common in judicial recognitions); and (iv) Open standing models that allow any person or organization to bring claims on behalf of nature (common in constitutional RoN regimes).

To address recurring enforcement critiques, we distinguish symbolic RoN (recognition without stable institutions, clear duties, funding, or enforceable remedies) from operational RoN (recognition embedded in decision-making and enforcement systems through guardianship authority, standing, compliance monitoring, and restoration remedies). This distinction helps explain why similar declarations can produce divergent outcomes across jurisdictions.

RoN arguments sometimes analogize to the expansion of legal personality to corporations and other collective entities (Stone, 2017). The analogy is useful to show that “rights-holders” are not limited to natural persons. However, the comparison has limits: corporations are instrumental legal fictions created to facilitate economic activity, whereas RoN frameworks aim to constrain extractive activity and protect ecological integrity. Unlike corporations, ecosystems do not have preferences that can be aggregated internally, making representation choices ethically and politically salient. Accordingly, RoN design must specify who speaks for nature, with what accountability, and how conflicts between ecological integrity and competing public interests are adjudicated.

Constitutional RoN provisions provide the strongest formal status because they bind legislatures, executives, and courts and can generate direct justiciable duties. Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution recognizes Pachamama as a rights-bearing subject and articulates rights to exist, persist, and regenerate its vital cycles (Arts. 71–74). Bolivia’s constitutional and statutory architecture similarly invokes Vivir Bien and Mother Earth as a rights-holder. In practice, constitutional RoN often combines broad substantive rights with expansive standing, enabling citizens and communities to litigate on behalf of nature.

However, constitutional recognition does not automatically resolve conflicts with extractive development policies. Ecuador’s post-2008 jurisprudence illustrates both the potential for strong judicial enforcement (e.g., Los Cedros, 2021) and the persistence of enforcement gaps when political economy pressures and sectoral laws undercut compliance (Business for Social Responsibility, 2026; Koehn and Nassl, 2023).

Legislative RoN frequently takes an ecosystem-specific form, granting personhood and governance arrangements to a particular river, park, or lagoon. New Zealand’s (2017) Te Urewera Act and Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act (2017) are paradigmatic: they embed Māori cosmology and treaty settlement history within statutory personhood, coupled with co-governance guardianship institutions (Earth Law Center, 2016). Spain’s (2022) Mar Menor Act similarly grants legal rights to a specific ecosystem, establishing representation bodies to defend the lagoon’s interests.

Other statutory approaches recognize nature more generally. Panama’s Law 287 (Republic of Panama, 2022) and Uganda’s National Environment Act (Republic of Uganda, 2019) include RoN-inflected language that frames nature as a subject of rights or imposes duties to protect ecological integrity (Van Zeebroeck, 2022). Sub-national ordinances in the United States represent another pathway, though they often face preemption and standing barriers.

Courts have recognized ecosystem personhood or RoN through reinterpretation of existing doctrines. In Colombia, the Constitutional Court’s Atrato River decision (T-622/2016) (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016) declared the river a subject of rights and ordered the creation of a community-state guardian council to address illegal mining and pollution. In India, the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers legal persons (High Court of Uttarakhand, 2017), and other high-court decisions have recognized wetlands and animals as rights-bearing subjects, often relying on parens patriae or public trust reasoning. Bangladesh’s High Court extended personhood to all rivers (Supreme Court of Bangladesh, 2019).

Judicial pathways can rapidly catalyze normative change, but they are particularly vulnerable to being stayed, narrowed, or left unenforced without legislative follow-through, a common reason these recognitions remain symbolic rather than operational.

Latin America has developed the most expansive RoN architecture, driven by constitutional transformation, Indigenous political mobilization, and rights-based constitutionalism (Berros and Carman, 2022). Ecuador and Bolivia institutionalized RoN through constitutional and statutory reforms, while Colombia illustrates a strong judicial pathway through the Atrato line of cases. The Inter-American human rights system has increasingly framed environmental protection as an autonomous right, and recent advisory opinions suggest a growing openness to ecocentric reasoning (Papantoniou, 2018).

In North America, RoN recognition has largely proceeded through sub-national ordinances and Indigenous/tribal laws rather than federal constitutional reform. In the United States, municipal RoN ordinances have proliferated (often to support anti-pollution measures or local water protection), but they frequently encounter preemption, standing doctrines, and state-level limits on local environmental authority (Business for Social Responsibility, 2026; Van Zeebroeck, 2022). In parallel, several Native American tribes have adopted RoN provisions in tribal law, recognizing rights of culturally significant species or ecosystems (e.g., wild rice/water systems), illustrating a governance route grounded in Indigenous legal orders (Business for Social Responsibility, 2026; Gilbert, 2023). Canada likewise has no federal RoN law; discussions have tended to focus on Indigenous stewardship and ecosystem-specific personhood proposals rather than nationwide constitutional change. Overall, the dominant North American pathway reflects federalism, robust property protections, and a legal culture in which constitutional environmental rights are comparatively limited.

In Europe, explicit recognition of Rights of Nature (RoN) remains rare and is largely mediated through anthropocentric environmental rights frameworks, particularly rights to health, life, private and family life, and a healthy environment (Alves et al., 2023). Rather than recognizing nature as a legal subject, European courts have predominantly protected ecological interests indirectly, by interpreting environmental degradation as a violation of human rights.

Recent European scholarship shows that this indirect pathway allows courts to strengthen environmental protection while remaining doctrinally anchored in established human-centered rights frameworks (Alves et al., 2023; CORDISEuropean Commission, 2020). This approach has enabled incremental advances in environmental jurisprudence without requiring a reconceptualization of legal subjectivity.

The dominance of this pathway reflects several structural features of the European legal order. First, the European Union’s competence structure limits the constitutionalization of novel legal subjects such as nature itself: while the EU exercises extensive regulatory authority over environmental matters, questions of legal personality and constitutional rights largely remain within national sovereignty and are constrained by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality (Dupuy and Viñuales, 2018). Second, environmental adjudication before the European Court of Human Rights is filtered through a proportionality framework that balances environmental protection against property rights and economic freedoms, creating doctrinal barriers to explicit ecocentric or RoN-based claims.

Against this background, Spain, 2022 is best understood as an exceptional, ecosystem-specific statutory experiment, driven by acute ecological degradation and sustained civic mobilization, rather than as evidence of a continent-wide shift toward Rights of Nature. Its significance lies in illustrating how RoN-inspired governance can emerge at the margins of a predominantly anthropocentric and human-rights-centered European legal architecture. These institutional features help explain why Europe’s RoN trajectory is dominated by rights-based environmental litigation and regulatory governance rather than constitutional or explicit RoN recognition.

In the Asia–Pacific region, New Zealand’s treaty-settlement statutes illustrate a legislative pathway grounded in Indigenous cosmology and co-governance institutions. In South Asia, by contrast, courts have been the primary innovators, but judicial recognitions have often lacked durable institutionalization (e.g., stays by higher courts) and thus struggled to become operational.

Across much of Africa, explicit Rights of Nature (RoN) recognition remains limited. Environmental constitutional provisions in the region are generally framed as human environmental rights (e.g., rights to health, wellbeing, or a healthy environment), rather than as rights held by nature as a legal subject. This pathway profile reflects a broader constitutional pattern in which environmental protection is often embedded within anthropocentric rights frameworks and developmental governance priorities, rather than ecocentric re-conceptualizations of legal subjectivity (Gilbert, 2023).

South Africa illustrates this pattern clearly. Section 24 of the Constitution of the Republic of South African Government, (1996) establishes a strong environmental right for people—protecting an environment not harmful to human health or wellbeing and mandating the state to protect the environment for present and future generations, but it has not been developed doctrinally as rights of nature (Krüger, 2019; South African Government, 1996). In other words, courts and institutions have largely treated the environment as an object of protection in service of human rights, rather than recognizing ecosystems as rights-holders.

Uganda provides one of the clearest statutory reference points in Africa. Uganda’s National Environment Act, 2019 explicitly recognizes that nature has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes, and provides standing mechanisms that can support enforcement (Republic of Uganda, 2019; United Nations Harmony with Nature, 2019). Yet the broader diffusion of RoN across the region is constrained by recurring implementation conditions documented comparatively in RoN literature, especially institutional capacity limits, competing development priorities, and the predominance of anthropocentric constitutional rights frameworks (Gilbert, 2023). In several contexts, Indigenous and community land and cultural rights can still protect ecosystems indirectly, through recognition of community tenure or cultural survival claims, but these protections typically do not formally reframe nature itself as a rights-holder. Beyond Uganda, RoN language appears intermittently in advocacy and local governance initiatives, but rarely as binding constitutional doctrine. These constraints help explain why the dominant pathway in much of Africa remains anthropocentric constitutional environmental rights, with only limited, mostly statutory RoN experimentation (e.g., Uganda).

RoN regimes require institutions to monitor ecological conditions, litigate, and implement restoration orders. Capacity gaps are reported in Ecuadorian and Colombian experiences where guardians or agencies lack consistent funding, technical expertise, or security to act effectively (Associated Press, 2024; Koehn and Nassl, 2023).

Extractive industries and infrastructure priorities can overwhelm RoN unless conflict-of-laws mechanisms and licensing systems are aligned. Ecuador illustrates the tension between constitutional RoN and ongoing mining concessions, creating recurring compliance disputes (Business for Social Responsibility, 2026).

Courts and agencies often lack clear standards for what constitutes a RoN violation, how to weigh competing public interests, or what remedies are proportionate. In Ecuador, inconsistent lower-court applications have been noted as a source of backlash and uncertainty (Guim and Livermore, 2021; Koehn and Nassl, 2023).

Guardianship design shapes legitimacy. Co-governance structures can embed Indigenous authority and accountability, while purely state-official guardianship risks bureaucratic inertia or political capture. Community guardian councils can increase cultural legitimacy but may face security risks and lack formal power (Associated Press, 2024).

Operational RoN requires ecological baselines, monitoring indicators, and restoration plans. Without them, rights remain difficult to vindicate in court or enforce administratively. Integrating RoN into environmental impact assessments and permitting can help translate rights into measurable compliance obligations.