The concept of the rights of nature, grounded in Pachamama's ontological status as a living, rights-bearing entity, is among the most philosophically radical developments in contemporary environmental law. Its entry into Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutional law generated immediate questions: can nature have legal standing? Who speaks for nature in court? What does "rights" even mean when the rights-holder is not a person, a corporation, or a state?
Ecuador's constitutional Article 71 states that nature, Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes. Any person, community, people, or nation can call upon public authorities to enforce these rights. The article explicitly uses the Quechua name, embedding an indigenous ontological claim directly into the liberal legal architecture of a modern state.
Philosophically, this represents what the Bolivian vice-president and philosopher Álvaro García Linera and postcolonial theorists call the "pluriverse", a world in which multiple ontologies coexist and have legitimate standing in political and legal life, not merely as cultural practices but as genuine alternative orderings of reality. The pluriverse concept challenges the universalism of the Western Enlightenment project: the claim that there is one real world described by one framework (scientific materialism, liberal individualism) to which all other frameworks are approximations or distortions.
The practical legal record is mixed but significant. Colombian courts citing Ecuador's constitution have granted rights to specific rivers. New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, drawing on Māori concepts of relational identity between people and land. The Ganges and Yamuna rivers were briefly granted legal personhood by Indian courts in 2017 before the Supreme Court stayed the ruling.
Critical scholars from within and outside Andean traditions have raised important questions. Marisol de la Cadena and other indigenous studies scholars argue that "rights of nature", a liberal legal concept, may domesticate and distort Pachamama's ontological meaning rather than genuinely enacting it. Pachamama, in Andean cosmology, is not a rights-bearer in the Western liberal sense (a rational agent with interests and claims); she is a living relational totality within which rights-language may simply not translate. There is a risk that the constitutional incorporation of Pachamama enacts a form of conceptual colonization in reverse, absorbing an indigenous ontology into a legal framework built on the ontological premises it was intended to challenge.