Rights of nature in socio-legal perspective: from law to practice

As the ecological crisis deepens, there is a growing call from lawyers and activists to revise the very foundations on which environmental law is built. One increasingly prominent proposal is to grant nature its own inherent rights. Lawmakers across the world have formally recognised rights of nature (RoN) and communities have started using rights language to nurture new relationships with nature. A thriving literature studies the socio-political dynamics underlying and emanating from this development. This paper reviews how this scholarship assesses the origins and impacts of such rights and lays out a research agenda for future inquiry. It identifies two dominant research paradigms and outlines a third, yet to be fully developed one. The first views RoN through the lens of contentious politics over their legal formalisation and enactment. The second situates them within (counter-)hegemonic discourses, probing their ability to disrupt entrenched ontologies. The third highlights how everyday practices interact with RoN. Rather than locating change in political victories or structural ruptures, this approach situates it in the endogenous shifts of routines in communities, movements, and organisations. The paper argues that dynamics of norm translation and routinisation can both reproduce but also resist dominant forms of governing nature.