Reframe #1 — Rights of Nature and the Many Faces of Guardianship
Rights of Nature is having its moment: across the world, rivers are becoming legal persons. Lagoons are acquiring rights. Constitutional provisions are being rewritten. Local communities are crafting new legal instruments to defend watersheds, forests, and ecosystems they depend on. Indigenous and Tribal nations are translating long-held obligations to land into contemporary legal frameworks.
Yet beneath the shared name, these initiatives are not all doing the same thing:
- They arise from different histories;
- They rest on different assumptions about the relationship between humans and the living world; and
- Crucially, they embody very different logics of guardianship: who speaks for a river, what gives them the authority to do so, and what kind of relationship the law is being asked to hold.
This piece offers a lens on Rights of Nature guardianship models, revealing differences that are worth examining further. We’ve spotted at least five distinct guardian logics emerging across the field. Each rests on different foundations. Each asks something different of the people enacting it. And each, when examined closely, raises its own set of questions. These aren’t rigid designations: a Rights of Nature case can sometimes combine elements of more than one guardian logic.
We look at each guardianship model through the same four dimensions: what kind of relationship the law is building on; where the authority to guard comes from; who the guardians are and how they are designated; and what key question or tension this logic surfaces.
1. Constitutional Guardianship
The state as primary steward
A landmark shift in legal imagination
Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution is the touchstone of this ‘model’. For the first time, the rights of Pachamama — Mother Earth — were written into a national constitution. Nature was no longer only property. It became a subject with legally enforceable rights to exist, regenerate, and be restored. Panama followed with national legislation. Bolivia enacted its Law of Mother Earth.
What relationship the law is building on
Constitutional guardianship works largely from scratch. The law creates a new category — nature as rights-holder — within a system that had not previously recognised it. The relationship being established is between the state and nature, mediated through legal text. It is, in this sense, a designed relationship rather than a pre-existing one being codified.
Where the authority to guard comes from
Authority derives from the democratic process that produced the constitution — from collective political will translated into the highest level of law. Citizens gain the right to file suits on nature’s behalf, but the state remains the primary institutional steward. The relationship is top-down in structure, even when bottom-up in its political origins.
Who the guardians are
State institutions — ministries, courts, regulators — are the primary guardians, alongside any citizen willing to bring a case. There is no designated guardian with a specific relationship to the entity being protected. Guardianship is diffuse and largely procedural.
The key tension
The state becomes both nature’s guardian and the entity that licenses the extraction threatening it. Ecuador’s mining and oil sectors continued largely uninterrupted after 2008. Bolivia approved major extractive projects on Indigenous territories after passing its Law of Mother Earth. Recognition and exploitation can coexist within the same legal framework.
A note on the UK
An emerging variant worth watching is the UK Nature’s Rights Bill, currently (June 2026) tabled in Parliament. It goes further than most constitutional models in one important respect: rather than placing nature within the existing hierarchy of rights, its Integrated Rights Framework embeds human and economic rights within the rights of nature — making ecological limits the foundation, not a constraint to be balanced against other interests.
It also proposes Bioregional Councils and a legal duty of care distributed across individuals, businesses, and public bodies — not just state institutions. If passed, this would represent a significant structural departure from the Ecuador model, and a signal worth following closely for anyone watching the European and UK landscape.
🌱 Seed:
Constitutional rights establish what matters legally. The question they leave open is: what relationship gives those rights force, when the guardian and the threat share the same institutional address?
2. Legal Personhood and Designated Guardianship
Representation through appointed stewards
A practical legal argument with deep roots
The Whanganui River in Aotearoa/NZ is the paradigmatic case for this ‘model’. After 140 years of advocacy by Whanganui iwi, the New Zealand Parliament recognised the river as a legal person — Te Awa Tupua — with two designated guardians: one appointed by the Crown, one by the iwi. Colombia’s Atrato River followed, its rights grounded in the constitutional protection of the biocultural communities depending on it. The underlying argument is simple and powerful: corporations and ships have legal standing; rivers do not. That is a choice, not a necessity.
What relationship the law is building on
In the best cases — Whanganui above all — the law is not creating a relationship but recognising one that already exists. The iwi guardianship carries centuries of relational depth. The legal structure was built to hold something that was already there. In other cases, personhood creates a legal vehicle without that underlying relationship — which changes what guardianship actually means in practice.
Where the authority to guard comes from
Authority is conferred by statute or court order — a hybrid of political process and legal designation. The guardian’s legitimacy comes from appointment within an existing legal framework, rather than through or on top of cultural inheritance. This gives it legal force, albeit (pending the case) can leave the relational dimension open.
Who the guardians are
Designated human representatives — appointed by the state, by Indigenous communities, or by both jointly. The quality of guardianship depends heavily on who is appointed and what their actual relationship to the entity is. Guardianship is a role. The quality of what it produces depends heavily on the depth of relationship the guardian brings to it — and that is not always specified or guaranteed by the legal structure itself.
The key tension
Legal representation can translate a relationship into law — or it can substitute for one. The difference matters enormously in practice. In the Whanganui case, the two-guardian structure was designed to ensure the iwi voice was structural, not advisory. That specificity of design is not always replicated.
🌱 Seed:
Personhood gives nature a voice within existing legal systems. Whether that voice carries genuine relationship — or merely resembles one — depends on who is behind it and why.
3. Community and Municipal Guardianship
Guardianship as frontline responsibility
Born from proximity and threat
Across North America, Ireland, and elsewhere, communities confronting specific ecological crises — a pipeline, a polluting refinery, a proposed extraction permit — have used Rights of Nature frameworks as tools of local resistance and defence.
Municipalities have passed ordinances granting rights to rivers, lakes, and watersheds, many pioneered through the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Colombia’s Atrato decision explicitly recognised the “biocultural rights” of the communities whose lives are woven into the river, making those communities its legal co-guardians.
What relationship the law is building on
This logic is grounded in existing relationship — the community already lives with, depends on, and cares about the entity in question. The law is not creating a new relationship but defending an existing one under threat. Guardianship arises from proximity, dependency, and what one might simply call love for a specific place.
Where the authority to guard comes from
Authority derives from the community’s direct relationship with the place — from lived knowledge, shared history, and the immediate stakes of ecological harm. It is relational authority, not procedural authority. This makes it viscerally legitimate and politically difficult to dismiss, even when legally vulnerable.
Who the guardians are
The community itself — residents, activists, local organisations, sometimes Tribal or Indigenous members within a broader coalition. Guardianship is not a role held by a designated individual but a collective posture taken by a community. It is often activated by crisis and sustained by ongoing relationship.
The key tension
Community ordinances frequently sit below state and federal law, can be vulnerable to legal override, and may be difficult to sustain beyond the immediate crisis that prompted them. The relational foundation is often strong; the jurisdictional position, particularly in the US context, has proven more fragile.
🌱 Seed:
Community guardianship is activated by relationship and proximity. The challenge is translating that activation into something durable enough to outlast the threat — and the moment — that triggered it.
4. Emergent Commons Guardianship
Collective civic recognition
A citizen-led signal from Europe
The Mar Menor lagoon in Spain — the first ecosystem in Europe to receive legal rights — came through an extraordinary citizen-led process: a popular legislative initiative backed by 600,000 signatures, eventually passed into law. It is a hybrid: civic mobilisation meeting legal innovation, an ecosystem recognised not through constitutional provision or appointed guardian but through collective civic will operating at scale. As a signal for a European audience, it matters enormously.
What relationship the law is building on
The relationship here is civic and collective rather than individual or cosmological. The lagoon becomes a shared subject of care — something closer to a commons in the older sense: not owned, not exploited, but collectively held and collectively responsible for. The relationship being expressed through law is one of civic belonging and shared stewardship.
Where the authority to guard comes from
Authority derives from democratic participation at scale — from the 600,000 people who signed, and from the legislative process that translated that will into law. It is collective authority, anchored in numbers and civic legitimacy rather than ecological relationship or cultural inheritance.
Who the guardians are
The legal guardians are designated institutional representatives, but the underlying guardians are the citizens who mobilised. Although Mar Menor also has legal personhood (refer to ‘model’ 2) , the guardian logic is quite different: whereas Whanganui's guardianship rests on two designated individuals carrying deep relational and cultural authority, Mar Menor's rests on the civic mobilisation of 600,000 people. This means, guardianship here is a civic act — enacted through political process and sustained, ideally, by ongoing public identification with the lagoon as something that belongs to all of them.
The key tension
Whether civic identification can sustain itself as governance once the mobilisation moment has passed is still being tested. The cultural shift may run ahead of the governance infrastructure needed to act on it. Mar Menor is still an early experiment.
🌱 Seed:
The commons model asks whether civic relationship to a place — at scale — can become a form of guardianship. The signal is significant. The durability is still being tested.
5. Obligational and Kincentric Guardianship
Guardianship as sacred duty
A structurally different starting point
A recent law review article — Tribal Rights of Nature Laws: Fulfilling Sacred Obligations by Ashley Dawn Anderson (Tulsa Law Review, 2026) — offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date of Tribal Rights of Nature initiatives in North America. Its central argument reframes the conversation: for most of the Tribal Nations it examines, Rights of Nature laws are not primarily environmental protection tools. They are acts of self-determination — the codification of obligations that already exist within Tribal cosmology, oral tradition, and kinship systems. The law is not innovating. It is remembering.
What relationship the law is building on
This is the sharpest distinction from many other guardian logics that are being applied. The relationship is not being created, designated, or mobilised by the law. It far pre-exists the law — carried in creation stories, sacred covenants, ceremonial roles, and oral traditions transmitted across generations.
- For the Menominee, the Menominee River is the place of origin of the people — the site from which the Great Bear emerged and the first five clans were formed. The 2020 resolution protecting the river’s rights is an act of protecting Menominee identity, not just Menominee ecology.
- For the Ponca, the Rights of Nature law emerges from the story of the Red Star Child — a being permitted to join Earth only by promising to honour the sacred system of life. That promise is the legal foundation.
- For the White Earth Nation, Manoomin (wild rice) is a gift from the Great Spirit, the fulfilment of a prophecy, and the anchor of homeland. The law is a translation of all of that — not its source.
Where the authority to guard comes from
Authority derives from cosmological obligation — from creation stories, sacred covenants with non-human beings, and the commands of the Creator as transmitted through oral tradition. It is not conferred by the state, by democratic process, or by designation. It is inherited, relational, and pre-legal.
- For the Nez Perce, the Chinook salmon made a covenant with the people at the beginning of time — offering itself as food, creating a reciprocal obligation that the people must restore all life in return. The Rights of the Snake River Resolution formalises that covenant. It does not create it.
Who the guardians are
Guardians already exist within Tribal cultural systems — in elders, women’s societies, clan roles, and ceremonial practices. E.g.
- The Pa’thata Women’s Society of the Ponca are the guardians of Ponca rivers by original instruction, not by appointment.
- The Mashpee Wampanoag youth who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Herring were acting within a living tradition of stewardship — simultaneously driving a Rights of Nature initiative and an act of cultural revitalisation.
- For the Tohono O’odham, the saguaro cactus is legally recognised as a person because it was always understood as one — the first saguaro was an O’odham person, and all saguaros are relatives and ancestors. Guardianship is not a role assumed. It is a responsibility one is born into.
The key tension — and the additional dimension
Anderson also surfaces something specific to Tribal Nations that the other four models do not tend to share: sovereignty. Tribal Nations do not need to wait for a US Congress to grant nature standing. They have inherent authority to define legal personhood within their own jurisdictions, apply Tribal customary law rather than American legal doctrines, and rebuild legal frameworks from their own epistemologies.
Rights of Nature here is not the reform of an existing system — it is the continuation of a different one. The challenge is that Tribal jurisdiction has real limits under US federal law, as the Manoomin v. Minnesota DNR and Sauk-Suiattle v. City of Seattle cases both illustrate. Legal sovereignty and jurisdictional reach are not the same thing.
🌱 Seed:
In most guardianship models, law creates or designates guardianship. In Tribal models, it recognises an obligation that precedes it — by many generations, carried through cosmology, ceremony, and kinship rather than through legal or civic process. That shifts the question from "how do we protect nature?" to "how do we honour what was always a living responsibility?
Cross-cutting insights
The source of guardian authority differs fundamentally across the five logics
Constitutional guardianship (1) derives authority from democratic process and state power. Legal personhood (2) derives it from statutory designation. Community guardianship (3) derives it from direct relational proximity. Emergent commons (4) derives it from civic mobilisation at scale. Obligational guardianship (5) derives it from cosmological inheritance — from the commands of Creators, transmitted through oral tradition, ceremony, and kinship.
These are not different degrees of the same thing. They are structurally different sources, with different implications for legitimacy, durability, and what it means to hold the authority to guard.
What the law is doing — creating or recognising — is not the same in each case
In ‘models’ 1, 3, and 4, law largely creates or formalises a new relationship. In ‘model’ 2, law recognises and holds an existing one. In ‘model’ 5, law translates an obligation that precedes the legal instrument by numerous generations. This distinction matters for understanding what “implementation” means in each case — and why constitutional rights can exist on paper while ecological destruction continues in practice.
Each logic has a specific vulnerability
Constitutional guardianship (1) faces the implementation gap when the state is simultaneously guardian and licensor of harm. Legal personhood (2) faces the risk that guardianship can become a technical role rather than a relational one.
Community guardianship (3) can face jurisdictional vulnerability and difficulty sustaining beyond crisis. Emergent commons (4) faces the question of whether civic identification can outlast the mobilisation moment. Obligational guardianship (5) faces the constraints of federal/national jurisdiction and the ongoing pressure of colonially-imposed legal frameworks that limit the reach of Tribal sovereignty.
Each logic also needs something specific in order to hold
Constitutional rights (1) need political will and enforcement infrastructure. Legal personhood (2) needs guardians with genuine relationship to the entity they represent. Community guardianship (3) needs jurisdictional protection and continuity. Emergent commons (4) needs governance infrastructure to match the civic will that produced it. Obligational guardianship (5) needs the transmission of knowledge, story, and ceremony across generations — which is why so many Tribal initiatives are simultaneously cultural revitalisation projects. The law is the outer form. The living relationship is what sustains it.
An emerging question: can the logics learn from each other?
The most interesting developments in the field may be where these logics begin to cross-pollinate — where constitutional frameworks are informed by kincentric thinking, where legal personhood models are deepened by relational accountability, where civic commons movements draw on Indigenous/ancestral obligations versus re-creating relationship from scratch.
The UK Bill’s aim to embed human rights within ecological limits, rather than balance them against each other, is one signal of this kind of cross-pollination. It is early. But it points toward a question the whole field is beginning to ask: not which guardian logic is ‘right’, but what each one has that the others may benefit from.
What these five logics ultimately reveal is that Rights of Nature is not one approach — it is many, each with a different answer to the same underlying question: ‘what does it mean to be responsible for the living world?’ How the field holds that diversity — and what each route genuinely learns from the others — may matter as much as the legal victories themselves.
Closing
Reframes are occasional pieces from the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox. They sit alongside our Learning Session syntheses and Field Dialogues as part of a growing body of field insights — reading the landscape, surfacing what deserves closer attention, and contributing to the kind of cross-field thinking that moves the work forward.
The sandbox is a space for serious inquiry and experimentation. These pieces are one expression of that — an attempt to see the field a little more clearly, together.
