UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.1002/j.1834-4461.2012.tb00133.x

Authors

Erin Fitz‐Henry

Reported year

2012

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:04:47.666818+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:07:01.650693+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

The University of Melbourne

Reported affiliation countries

AU

Documentary abstract — original language

ABSTRACT In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W2065094481

DOI

10.1002/j.1834-4461.2012.tb00133.x

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::5cb6e7784aefd65e09e988a82f0f606f

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

Article · article

Natural entities mentioned

Ecosystem

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.2012.tb00133.x
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W2065094481

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1500210162 · CITES
• LA SENDA BIOCÉNTRICA: VALORES INTRÍNSECOS, DERECHOS DE LA NATURALEZA Y JUSTICIA ECOLÓGICA · CITES
• openalex:w1547237219 · CITES
• openalex:w1724359623 · CITES
• Liberal democracy and the rights of nature: The struggle for inclusion · CITES
• openalex:w1975580813 · CITES
• openalex:w1979443573 · CITES
• openalex:w2003605835 · CITES
• La naturaleza con derechos: de la filosofía a la política · CITES
• openalex:w2020659427 · CITES
• openalex:w2021329732 · CITES
• openalex:w2031322854 · CITES
• openalex:w2038680144 · CITES
• openalex:w2041202139 · CITES
• openalex:w2057746856 · CITES
• openalex:w2081641428 · CITES
• openalex:w2095184253 · CITES
• openalex:w2102372299 · CITES
• openalex:w2105210094 · CITES
• openalex:w2141474470 · CITES

12 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

This identity is not yet included in the Legal Library.