The Challenge of the Rights of Nature: from Recognition to Implementation.A Conceptual Framework and the Facilitating Role of Emerging Technologies
The global ecological crisis of the Anthropocene reveals the deep inadequacy of anthropocentric frameworks for understanding and protecting socio-ecological systems. Rights of Nature have been formally recognized in constitutional frameworks (Ecuador, 2008), jurisprudential decisions (Atrato River, Colombia, 2016), and legislative instruments (Mar Menor, Spain, 2022; Whanganui River, New Zealand, 2017). However, a persistent gap remains between formal legal recognition and effective implementation, pointing to unresolved ontological, epistemological, and functional dimensions. This thesis departs from the intuitive detection of that gap and develops a systematic scientific response to it.
The central research question is: to what extent is it feasible to develop a conceptual framework for representing the Rights of Nature in a way that the human-Nature relationship, mediated by emerging technologies, contributes to displacing a strictly anthropocentric understanding?
Building on Critical Realism (Bhaskar, 1978) as its epistemological foundation, the research integrates theoretical frameworks including Socio-Ecological Systems (SES/SETS), Relational Ontology, and the Philosophy of Care. The empirical work combined qualitative analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews with international experts on Rights of Nature, systematic analysis of five emblematic cases (Ecuador, Atrato River, Whanganui River, Mar Menor, and Río Tins), and a complementary Likert-scale questionnaire. The Gioia Methodology (Gioia et al., 2013) structured a three-level abductive construction of the conceptual framework, ensuring full traceability from expert voices to theoretical architecture.
The analysis yielded twelve fundamental propositions organized along three analytical dimensions: ontological (O1–O4), epistemological (E1–E5), and functional (F1–F3). A significant empirical finding is the identification of an epistemological turn in the field: expert attention has shifted from foundational ontological debates toward mechanisms of knowledge construction, cultural transformation, and governance for effective implementation. The epistemological dimension concentrates the highest convergence across all fifteen experts, reflecting the field's current priorities.
The central theoretical contribution is the Conceptual Framework of Nature as a Subject of Relation (NSR), structured around five conceptual axes—Entities, Attributes, Relations, Networks of Expertise, and Environment—and three operational phases: Capture, Interpretation, and Activation. Emerging technologies are positioned not as central solutions, but as transversal facilitators operating across all five axes, subordinated to principles of care, community empowerment, and non-extractivity.
The NSR framework responds directly to the identified gap: it addresses the technical-juridical gap by proposing forms of representation beyond declarative recognition and confronts the epistemological gap by transforming the objectual view of Nature into a relational one. Empirical plausibility of the framework is supported by systematic contrast with the five emblematic cases and dense methodological triangulation documented across four complementary appendices.
This research contributes to the scientific field of Rights of Nature by offering a theoretically grounded, empirically substantiated, and operationally oriented conceptual architecture that establishes the ontological, epistemological, and functional foundations needed to guide
future operational implementations of the Rights of Nature toward a relational and non-anthropocentric socio-ecological governance.