Abstract

TAMAYO-ALVAREZ, RAFAEL. The Rights of Nature and the Principle of Buen Vivir as a Decolonial Turn in International Environmental Governance. Rev. Derecho Estado [online]. 2023, n.54, pp.19-54.  Epub Feb 04, 2023. ISSN 0122-9893.  https://doi.org/10.18601/01229893.n54.02.

This article criticizes the current structure of international environmental governance. To that end, it examines three normative responses to strengthening environmental protection in armed conflicts, international criminal law, and international economic law. The objective is to demonstrate that the common denominator among them is to subject environmental protection to the achievement of anthropocentric interests. Accordingly, they reproduce an instrumental view of nature, whose legal protection is a function of its utility or value for the human species rather than its intrinsic importance. Nevertheless, the anthropocentrism prevailing in international law is not accidental but an expression of the contemporary legal imagination forged by capitalist modernity. Hence, to provide adequate responses to the climate crisis and the growing demands for environmental justice, international law must epistemologically detach from the anthropocentric approach that conceives society-nature relations from the capitalist logic of producing value. Specifically, the proposal is that, as a decolonial turn, international law should embrace the rights of nature and the principle of buen vivir as concepts that promote transformative approaches to political economy.

Keywords : Rights of nature; principle of buen vivir; anthropocentrism; ecocentrism; decolonial turn.

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