The growing appeal of the Rights of Nature (RoN) framework reflects a significant evolution in legal and ecological thought. It challenges anthropocentric assumptions and tries to reposition nature not just as a source but also a bearer of rights. From Christopher Stone’s foundational piece, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, to the codification of RoN in Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, and India, RoN have emerged as a prominent response to ecological degradation as well as the failures of environmental regulation. The former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, has even described it as the fastest-growing legal movement of the twenty-first century.
Yet amid this optimism, the question still remains that what really is being transformed and in accordance with which worldviews? The RoN Movement often claims to reflect Indigenous philosophies, but its dominant formulations frequently reflect the same extractive, colonial, and universalizing logics that they in fact intend to disrupt. Through this article, I do not aim to discredit RoN as a whole. Rather, I evaluate the ontological and political assumptions behind its dominant expressions. Specifically, I ask whether rights-based approaches, even if ecologically motivated, still continue to operate within the grammar of legal modernity, which is often misaligned with the relational, place-based ontologies held by many Indigenous communities.
Instead of simply celebrating the inclusion of nature within legal systems, the more urgent task is to question what kind of world such recognition imagines and enables. Global RoN discourse spans various places and contexts, as thoughtfully mapped in the symposium on the Rights of Nature, which traces the diverse pathways through which RoN emerges from specific socio-ecological conflicts and circulates through global legal imaginaries.
In this article I focus on India to ground my arguments and reflect on how legal developments here reproduce or resist dominant RoN logics and what, perhaps, is required to truly reflect indigenous ethos of RoN movement.
The Ontological Politics of Nature in RoN
At the conceptual core of RoN lies the figure of “nature”, however this figure is not politically or ontologically neutral. Much of RoN’s theoretical foundation is influenced by eco-theologians like Thomas Berry and jurists like Godofredo Stutzin, who construct a singular, unified, and often feminized nature, “Mother Earth.” In the legislative texts of Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as in declarations like the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, nature is instilled with the language of nurturing, sacrifice, and care. This symbolic elevation aligns with a gendered eco-theology that tries to project Earth as the archetypal mother.
Indian jurisprudence also reflects a similar trend. In A. Periyakaruppan v. Principal Secretary, the court declared “Mother Nature” as a living being with all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities. The court provided that past generations had handed over a pristine Earth, and it was a moral duty to do the same for future generations. In Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand (2017), the court provided constitutional rights for Mother Earth. These judgments although seem to be a step towards the RoN movement, they often suppress the diverse Indigenous understandings of nature into a singular, eco-theological symbol – Mother Earth.
For many Indigenous communities in India, nature is not simply reducible to a universal maternal figure. For instance, the Madia tribe worships Pheda Phen which is a dual-gender deity embodied in a tree, worshipped by men in feminine form and by women in masculine form. The Gond tribe, while worshipping Dharti Mata (Mother Earth), also worships other spirits like Kanya (a water spirit), which is not gendered. Nature, in this sense, is not a unitary figure but is a combination of various elements. These practices reveal an ontology that is plural, dynamic, and relational—not totalizing. Yet the dominant RoN frameworks try to abstract and impose a gendered vision of nature that erases this diversity, both domestically and internationally.
This symbolic incorporation is often found in preambles or other legislative documents and hides a deeper institutional conservatism. This feminization of nature clearly aligns seamlessly with neoliberalism where it imagines nature as merely a producer or provider. The metaphor of Mother Earth then becomes aligned with capitalist and state interests through which it becomes easier to manage and exploit nature while framing their actions in a rhetoric of symbolic respect. The outcome then is often what we might call superficial Indigeneity, as a rhetorical inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing without actual meaningful recognition of Indigenous governance and knowledge systems. This constitutes a form of epistemic appropriation, where Indigenous ontologies are translated into Western legal vocabulary, taking away from their situated meanings.
Strategic Translation and Legal Subversion
However, Indigenous engagement with RoN is not always simply passive or assimilative. We can take the instance of the Māori iwi, the indigenous tribal group, in Aotearoa (New Zealand) who have mobilized the RoN frameworks not to affirm state legal framework, but to subvert and reshape them. The landmark legal recognition of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera as legal persons was not just symbolic. These were acts of foundational claims. The 2014 law reframing Te Urewera from a national park to a legal entity established a hybrid governance model with substantial Tūhoe (indigenous group) participation. It framed land management as management of people for the benefit of the land, reversing the usual hierarchy.
The management plan, Te Kawa o Te Urewera, largely avoids the rights discourse. Instead, it grounds values of reciprocity, guardianship, and relational ethics. Here, the river is not protected just because it serves humans, but because it is kin to humans. The role of Te Pou Tupua, the “human face” of the Whanganui River, is of a form of representation derived from the ancestral ties and mutual obligation that humans have towards nature, not the bureaucratic guardianship. This model transcends the anthropocentric logic of RoN as seen in other jurisdictions.
These Indigenous legal interventions do not simply adapt to RoN but bring structural reorientations. They demonstrate how RoN can become a tool of legal pluralism when anchored in Indigenous jurisprudence, not merely included for legitimacy. The Māori cases show that the political stakes are not just about recognizing nature’s rights, but about reimagining the legal order itself.
The Indian Jurisprudence: Guardianship, Not Governance
In contrast, Indian RoN jurisprudence reveals the limitations of symbolic recognition without providing any structural transformation. In Mohammed Salim v. State of Uttarakhand (2017), the High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers to be legal persons. The court appointed state officials and the Director of ‘Namami Gange’ (the river project) as the rivers’ guardians. Similarly, in Lalit Miglani case, the court grants power to appoint individuals as guardians for glaciers and other ecosystems to the state chief secretary. Even though the court recognizes the RoN, it follows a parens patriae framework where the state claims to act as a guardian. However, such guardianship merely re-centralizes power to the state and does not empower the local communities or Indigenous actors to participate in the decision-making capacity. The legal personality of nature, therefore, becomes a tool for reinforcing bureaucratic control rather than providing ecological autonomy.
Furthermore, Indian RoN judgments also remain primarily anthropocentric. The justification for protecting nature is derived from intergenerational equity or the human right to life as was given by the court in the Periyakaruppan case. Here, nature is not valued in its essence, but for its utility to human survival. The concept of rights is modified to prioritize human interests, even when it is being extended to non-human entities and this framing subverts the foundational RoN premise that nature has value in itself, not merely in relation to humans.
What is missing in Indian jurisprudence is a shift from representation to relation. The state “represents” nature, but there is little recognition of the ongoing, situated relationships that Indigenous and local communities maintain with land, water, and forest. These relationships are not just cultural or spiritual; they are legal, epistemological, and ethical.
From Rights to Relation
So, what would it mean to shift from a rights-based framework to a relational one? This would require an ontological reorientation as is seen in the New Zealand case, rather that just semantic shift. Even when extended to rivers or forests, the rights-based framework retains the logic of liberal legalism where it individualizes, codifies, and subjects non-human life to legal categories that may not truly resonate with their lived realities or Indigenous understandings. Tanasescu argues that a relational jurisprudence would begin not with universal categories but with place-based ontologies. It would recognize that rivers are not ‘objects’ with legal status, but kin with whom communities co-exist and co-flourish. This implies a move from representation to relation, not just by appointing guardians for nature, but restoring the capacities of communities to live in accordance with their ecological knowledges derived from indigenous epistemologies.
Practically, this requires more than judicial declarations. It calls for constitutional and legislative recognition of Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and waters; support for community-led governance models; and the dismantling of hierarchical structures that prioritize state-centric management similar to as seen in the Maori cases. India’s diverse legal traditions provide a rich environment for rethinking nature’s role in law, as opposed to importing foreign RoN models. For example, legal models that represent co-presence rather than dominion could be influenced by the Madia or Gond approaches to worship and ecological regulation. These customs frequently entail acts of collective caregiving and gratitude, which are examples of ecological governance that go beyond the logic of rights. It would be necessary to move away from merely legal declarations and towards grounded, participatory practices in order to incorporate such ethics into formal law.
The future of RoN should not focus on the further juridification of nature, but in the recognition and promotions of an ethics of relation. This would require recognizing that while legal personhood is important, it is not the endgame. True transformation will be derived from decolonizing the legal imagination itself, starting from learning to think, relate, and govern with the land by recognizing and acknowledging indigenous forms of knowing.
In the end, the question is not just whether nature should have rights, but what kind of world those rights assume and enact. A RoN framework rooted in Indigenous relationality, rather than liberal abstraction, offers the possibility of a world where law is not a tool of dominion but a practice of care.