Are the International Tribunals of Rights of Nature pluriversal?

Introduction

The Rights of Nature (RoN) approach to climate crises is gaining importance in environmental governance. Countries around the world are recognizing rivers, forests, mountains, and other natural beings as subjects of rights. This is the outcome of concerted efforts by legal and environmental activists, Indigenous groups, and other civil society organizations who view this as an alternative to transforming the ways in which we comprehend not just climate change, but human relationship with nature. They believe that the root of the problem lies in human (dis)connection with nature, which is a consequence of the hegemony of the modern Western rationality. This separation ¹ has conditioned the environmental agenda. The expectation is that a different paradigm, which reconnects humans and nature, will be more effective to halt climate change. ² Existing mechanisms perpetuate the damage, the causes of environmental degradation and maintain inequalities. ³ For RoN approach, nature is a living entity with its own interests and rights, not a resource that human beings can use and exploit.

Internationally, RoN are mostly promoted by the Global Alliance of Rights of Nature Movement (GARN), a network of organizations and individuals, activists, scientists, attorneys, Indigenous leaders, politicians, actors, and scholars from all over the world, which has already impacted local, national, and international legislation and programmes. One of the most interesting initiatives of GARN are the International Tribunals of Rights of Nature (ITRN) created in 2014. These tribunals aim to become a forum for people from all over the world to speak on behalf of nature. ⁴ They are a suis generis actor in climate change politics, whose potential has not yet been analyzed.

Today there is a divided opinion among scholars, practitioners, and activists about RoN and the ITRN. Some say they are progressive, allow non-humans to participate, challenging existing orders, offering a more adequate approach to environmental matters. ⁵ Others warn that despite of their advantages, they still work within liberal frames and do not escape some conceptual, colonial universalization that attempt against their own purposes. ⁶ As Youatt argues, nature’s rights become an instrument in new forms of environmental governance for a greenwashing that legitimates the ongoing control, commodification, and repackaging of nature for profit. Extending rights to nature is patronizing, patriarchal, and imperialistic, because it subsumes it into the human political apparatus. ⁷ For others, the problem for recognition is not in the premises that RoN contest, but the lack of strong procedural RoN mechanisms, which include equal opportunities, access to information and to administrative and judicial remedies for both human and natural beings. ⁸ In general, IR could contribute to more robust discussions on the matter. However, while clinging to traditional theories and entrenched arguments, it fails to contribute effectively to the more diverse and insightful conversations surrounding environmental degradation.

This paper aims to analyze the role of ITRN as a space for the interaction of multiple ontologies or worlds through alternative practices in environmental governance and IR. It acknowledges that while IR has made plural or critical theoretical contributions, it remains deeply embedded in traditional anthropocentric ways of thinking. However, there is a growing recognition among scholars for the need to rethink the human relationship with nature ⁹ and to recognize nature as an actor in international life. This reorientation of the discipline can make it more responsive to non-human agency ¹⁰ and drive fundamental change in environmental governance. The dominant view of environmental issues is derived from modern/Western colonial thought and is anthropocentric in nature. This places humans as an exceptional actor on the planet, separating them from the rest of the species. This exceptionality, however, is not universal, it is based on specific cultural and historical contexts. Including the other-than-human and placing them on the same level as humans in the context of environmental issues is a complex task. It requires challenging the assumptions of anthropocentrism and reevaluating the human-nature relationship. By doing so, we can move toward a more relational and pluriversal understanding of our connection with nature. ¹¹

The argument here is that ITRN provide a space for the pluriverse, for other worlds to relationally interact. This does not happen without complications, for proceedings can also be interpreted as pertaining to, or coopted as modern/Western (liberal) understandings of rights, recapturing and marginalizing Indgenous and non western voices. Yet, on the other hand, saying that tribunals are hybrid would be reductionist. This paper seeks to address this drawing from pluriversal relationality, political ontology, and cosmopolitics to identify the relational nuances that reveal the pluriverse. It focuses on the ways participants engage in the hearings, the roles they play and the worlds they bring with them. This provides fresh insights intended to not only redefine responses to environmental issues, but to introduce alternative viewpoints that can reframe and reground IR through relational approaches.

Over the course of 4 years, I have closely followed the work of the tribunals online. I watched the hearings of the European Tribunal in Defence of the Aquatic System of 2021, which took place virtually, and I had the opportunity to attend the 5th International Tribunal of Rights of Nature in Glasgow, deciding on two cases: the Amazon Case and False Solutions to Climate Change Case. I revised documents, literature, decisions, and verdicts and conducted 11 semi structured interviews with people directly involved in the ITRN (judges, prosecutors, witnesses, staff members of GARN and scholars). These interviews aimed to gather information about the tribunal’s operations, the expectations of the participants including organizers, legal experts, and advocates.

Contacting the Secretary General of the Tribunals was key in facilitating my research: the tribunals in Glasgow took place during the last phase of the pandemic, creating challenges for participants to obtain visas on time and organize the event. Being based in the UK during my postdoctoral fellowship, the organizers offered me the opportunity to participate as a volunteer. This role granted me access to event planning and organization meetings to plan the tribunals, put the cases together, and contact participants. It also provided me with the opportunity to establish contact with individuals who, despite the COVID-19 circumstances, were able to travel to Glasgow and share their cases. This was indeed a personal challenging experience, for I was critical of the Tribunals, and although I still am critical of the RoN approach, being at the hearings transformed my intake of ITRN. They do not only advocate for RoN but allow other (more pluriversal) positioning of actors, showing the significance of non-anthropocentric spaces in addressing environmental challenges. I could only grasp this diversity by being there. As a volunteer, I gained insights into the formal actors of the ITRN and experienced it as an individual in the audience, learning about how climate damage affects livelihoods and beings (human and non-human), and specially how they (re)act and struggle. To deeply understand this, one must engage emotionally.

During the preparation and for practical reasons, organizers contacted participants who were attending other platforms at COP26. To ensure inclusive participation for those unable to travel, they made the crucial decision of having a hybrid tribunal both virtual and in-person. This required considerable resources and logistic planning from abroad to guarantee simultaneous translations to English, French, and Spanish. As part of the team of volunteers, my responsibilities included assisting participants in reaching the venue, providing support with their presentations, contributing to logistics management, and maintaining internal communication with the Secretariat in Ecuador during the hearings to make sure everything was working in terms of sound, translation, order of participation, and time management.

The arguments developed here are based on this whole experience, combined with semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis. The findings contribute to the broader understanding of ontological difference and the complexity this brings to approach environmental challenges.

The paper is structured as follows: in the next section, I provide a theoretical framework that draws from pluriversal relationality to argue that the ITRN provide a space for other worlds to appear, although sometimes very subtly. In the second section I describe the ITRN showing their significance in facilitating different – pluriversal – worldings. In the last section I refer to specific interventions and quote participants’ testimonies and experiences to transmit, as accurately as possible, how they bring their worlds to the hearings. It is through the delicate interplay of various perspectives that conversations between Western science, Western liberal understanding of rights and nature, and relational or pluriversal concepts take place.

Pluriversal relationalities to understand the ITRN

Relationality implies that relations constitute reality instead of given or pre-existing entities, units, or things. ¹² In other words, ‘things are not simply of or for themselves, rather they are made through their relations, relation secrete realities. Not only do things become in relation, but they also take shapes’ and in becoming more real they become multiple. ¹³ Relational approaches ¹⁴ see realities as ceaselessly in movement, as an ever-changing web of inter-relations involving humans and other-than-human. Such ontologies eschew binaries constituted as opposite things and contribute to think and theorize differently. ¹⁵ They challenge assumptions of existence like thinking ‘that the world is one, that it is knowable on a global scale within single modes of thought, and is thus manageable and governable in those terms’. ¹⁶

Alternatively, the world can actually be composed of many worlds: a pluriverse. ¹⁷ This world of worlds does not constitute an opposite to the ‘universe’, but appears as coexisting in relational duality, complementarity, and immanence with it. ¹⁸ Escobar, introduced the concept of the pluriverse to challenge the dominant Western worldview by proposing a reality where multiple worlds and forms of life coexist, each with its own unique way of knowing and being. According to Escobar ‘notions of the pluriverse imply multiple ontologies, multiple worlds, and not simply multiple perspectives on one world’. ¹⁹ The pluriverse is a response to the crises of modernity, suggesting that the problems we face globally cannot be solved within the same rationalities that created them. This, however, does not imply a rejection of the ability of subaltern groups to ‘be modern’ or to function in modern milieux. ²⁰ In fact, as Escobar affirms, ‘we all weave the pluriverse together through our designs and daily practices; thus the struggle to reinhabit the pluriverse in an Earth-wise manner is not just for indigenous peoples or people in the Global South but for everyone’. ²¹ Therefore, instead of human versus nature, modern versus non-modern, or universe versus pluriverse (either/or), relationality understands their existence as co-existence (both/and).

The problem is that modern Western design of the world, which is based on separation, has been universalized to the point that it is assumed as the only one, whereby leaning on the taken-for-granted objectivity of science; these assumptions are rarely acknowledged. As it follows, Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma call this the ‘default settings’, in the sense that we do not recognize them as particular to our worldview but as if they were true to all reality. ²² One could argue that environmental crises, governance, and the responses to them are conditioned by the default setting of the separation between human and nature. There are other ontologies that assume that ‘human’ are deeply interconnected with other beings and domains, natural and spiritual. These, however, are hard to recognize because. ²³ Yet the other worlds coexist here at the margins, intertwined, in latency. They are there, but our modern frameworks, vocabulary and categories are sometimes unable to grasp them without translating them back to familiar languages and ontological assumptions. This traps us, and even when other worlds exist, they are quickly lost or obscured. These authors describe these moments of obscuring as ‘ontological slippages’, or to slip back to the dominant ontology (by default). When this happens, we tend to miss the pluriverse and its transformative potential. ²⁴ However, in the relational tension, obscuring can also become a process of transforming and giving space or open the interstice, and the same logics that cause the ontological slippages can be transformed into portals to relational politics. ²⁵ Such portals and bridges act as relational ways of traversing thresholds, as well as being in the liminal space in between worlds. ²⁶

As I show in the last section of this piece, the ITRN can be portals that open the possibility of latent worlds to be present in the hearings, but it is inevitable that they are silenced again by the ontological slippage when we translate them back to our familiar Western dominant reality, for instance by translating pluriversal manifestations into the western language of ‘rights of nature’. Blaser’s concept of political ontology is useful here. It recognizes multiple realities and focuses on the conflicts that arise when different ontologies interact, especially under conditions of asymmetric power. Political ontology provides a space for studying these relationships and the knowledge systems that are often suppressed by dominant ontologies. It is due to those slippages and the political ontology that we tend to overlook when a pluriversal manifestation takes place. The idea of how these other ontologies may become evident is through different performative practices that create worlds. According to Blaser practices and interactions of humans and non-human shape ontologies, and ‘hence, ontologies perform themselves into worlds’. ²⁷

This means that the constant interaction of relations constitutes reality through performative practices. Consequently, that ‘what exists’ is always the effect of practices through our everyday experiences. ²⁸ As Hinchliffe puts it: ‘If we accept that things are done through practices and that practices are heterogenous, involving different places, people and many different things, then it follows that things will not entirely be settled matters’. ²⁹ In other words, we create reality ³⁰ and world different worlds.

It is in practice that slippages turn into portals and bridges, but as transformative practices, we should not assume or expect a specific outcome. In relationality, the constant flow and transformation do not necessarily produce a foreseeable result, practices just are, so they can produce dualist worldviews, or they can produce pluriversal ones, here is the tension. ³¹

To transform a moment of ontological slippage that obscures the pluriverse into an enabling one, it is important to shift our perspective and approach and to develop certain sensibilities. Stengers affirms that to see ‘multiple divergent worlds, and the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’, ³² we need to ‘slow down reasoning’ to question the naturalized affirmations of the ‘universe’ and to start seeing what it conceals. The skill of slowing down is particularly important during the hearings at the ITRN.

The sensibility of slowing down reasoning to prevent the ontological slippage of translating back to modern languages is what the reader will need to understand the testimonies in the last section as participant bring their world, as actors take into practice a different kind of court-like proceeding, that creates and announces different worlds. This sensibility would allow us to see such interventions as relational portals to other worlds as suggested before or as creating spaces in-between. Here, Anzaldúa’s ³³ use of the concept nepantilism is illustrative because it highlights the importance of seeing from multiple perspectives simultaneously. It allows for a deeper understanding of different worlds challenging the dominant one. One way to see this transformation is to know that interconnectedness does not mean merging, ³⁴ but in-betweenness. Portals offer an in-between standpoint that allow the interaction of worlds. Arguably, ITRN can offer such portals.

International Tribunals of Rights of Nature

The Tribunal rules for all those beings who have no voice: rivers, forests, animals, plants. ³⁵

The first ITRN was held in Quito in 2014. Since then, there have been 5 international, 2 regional, and 11 local tribunals in different parts of the world. ³⁶ At the time of writing, they have had 29 cases. With time they have expanded its actions to take a more active role in in situ verifications (Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru). Normally the ITRN take place in the same venue as the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP).

The ITRN operate according to the normative body of RoN that aligns and abides human legal systems to the laws of nature, moving from a western framework of separation between nature and culture:

Judge Mead’s remarks:

The move to divide the living world into separable eco systems of services is the result of western mindset. Unfortunately, solutions are and come from the same mindset that causes the problems. The tribunal departs from the philosophical idea of repair and restore and heal our relationship with mother earth. ³⁷

ITRN adopt a standpoint that shifts away from the binary land/resource, human/nature, object/subject. They accept that both human and nature – as an other-than-human being, and all beings are persons interconnected and affected by the same natural laws, from which they derive their ‘rights’. ³⁸

ITRN are composed of ad hoc judges from different nationalities and backgrounds, who base their verdicts on evidence presented by victims, witnesses, and experts following a due process established in the Tribunals’ statutes. ³⁹ Their decisions are not binding and do not have a juridical effect. Rather, judgements are ethical, and aim at changing deeper structures of human behavior. ⁴⁰ Punishments and fines are not the solution. Instead acts of naming, shaming, and shaping hearts and minds contribute to raise awareness about human behavior toward nature. ⁴¹ The ITRN were created by civil society, not states. Activists bring their cases to the ITRN as one of their ways to call attention to specific environmental damaging practices. They still lack official states’ recognition or international juridical personhood, and no defendant has yet responded to allegations against them or attended the hearings. ⁴² This, it is argued, is a shortcoming to guarantee state commitments and corporation responsibility. However, since the ITRN started, the number of cases brought to them has exponentially grown from 11 in 2017 to 29 by 2024 and geographically expanded, to the point that they do not have the capacity nor the resources to attend them all. ⁴³ Even if it is unlikely that states will ratify the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME), which is their normative compass, there is a growing demand from civil society and diverse groups to address environmental challenges differently and are a relevant platform for many to make claims and raise their voices. Falk has described these practices as a jurisprudence that comes from below, from civil society. ⁴⁴ It is a pioneering exercise. ⁴⁵

Expert testimonies come from scientific, indigenous, or local parties who contribute with knowledge and evidence about the possible causal connections between damage and the actor responsible. They can also suggest solutions. Witnesses declare how damage is experienced by both human and other-than-human populations in the affected area. During the hearings, judges and prosecutor ask questions on aspects that are not clear or not fully proved and request further evidence, when necessary, before reaching a decision.

Judges base their decisions on two types of sources: The declaration of rights to specific natural beings at a regional or national legislation (e.g., Bolivia RoN law, Atrato and Ganges rivers recognition in Colombia and India, respectively, to name a few) or their recognition in political constitutions (Ecuador); and the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth, which was drafted at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010. ⁴⁶

Tribunals acknowledge that activism alone is not achieving enough change in corporations’ and states’ behavior, and environmental law is not the answer because it perpetuates, protects, and legitimizes the continued degradation of Earth. In fact, many practices that pollute and destroy are legal and lawful, a problem derived from a system that sees nature as an object. ⁴⁷

According to Judge Cullinan,

When there is no duty to respect an object, the question of respect is not even raised. In this case it is important that we recognize the lake as a being deserving of respect. If the question to undertake an activity was: is this an activity that respects the lake as a being? Then the result would have been very different. . . ⁴⁸

But there are caveats as well. On one hand, legal practices enable and maintain logics of exclusion, subordination, annihilation through the means of recognition of law and are not exempt of power relations. ⁴⁹ According to Tănăsescu, ⁵⁰ RoN are deeply intertwined with pre-existing structures of power and that granting rights to nature is a way of bypassing rights of self-determination to Indigenous people. Then, the expansion of rights to earth-beings silences different enunciations and possibilities to have a deeper and plural conversation. On the other hand, the recognition of the rights of nature does not necessarily guarantee protection of affected beings. In fact, states can use this to divert attention or to allow other ways of depletion. For example, Bolivia has approved a law on the rights of Mother Earth but has not further legislated on its implementation. This lack of action has allowed the state to continue policies of extractivism. In Ecuador, RoN are used to ban illegal miners ended up asphyxiating local legal miners. ⁵¹

These concerns are serious and important. Here, it is necessary to understand the creation and transformation of the tribunals and what they might become in the future, and to see them as not necessarily and blindly repeating the previous errors. In 2014 the tribunals started as an exercise of imagination of what it would be like if an eco-centric paradigm were in place. Its founders conceived the first Tribunal in Quito as a transnational platform from which to advertise and call attention on the RoN movement ⁵² and cases were organized as ‘showcases’. ⁵³ In that sense, a variety of actors convened to speak up, to show evidence in court-like hearings. There was not a pre-determined idea of what the Tribunals would become. ⁵⁴

Now, they acknowledge that there is a growing demand of a civilizational change, ⁵⁵ a systemic change ⁵⁶ from capitalist logics to eco-centered systems. The tribunals must transform and adapt as well. ⁵⁷ The problem is to think of court like proceedings as the only path. It must serve as an initial step to transition, yet not permanent practice. ⁵⁸ Even if they started as a showcase platform, now there is an incentive to position the ITRN as an authority in alternative approaches to environmental governance. How this may happen is not clear, for there is no agreement on what the future of the ITRN should be. For some, the ITRN must aim to engage with ‘ecological jurisprudence’, a plural charter of different notions of rights and legal systems but still founded on jurisdictional and legal criteria ⁵⁹ ; for others, it needs a formal institutionalization and state recognition, international personhood and jurisdiction to produce binding legal verdicts that guarantee compliance and law transformation ⁶⁰ ; others consider important that the Tribunals remain ethical, questioning human behavior toward nature, the capitalist system and the social injustices it causes. ⁶¹

Tribunals symbolize something different for participants, and therefore expectations are quite different. This variety is key for the analysis. The symbolic importance of the court-like procedure is relevant in the sense of developing skills of gathering and presenting proofs and evidence; on creating networks and alliances among participants; to have a space where participants can raise their voices on their own terms; to have a sense of holding accountable those who are allegedly responsible, but most importantly, to imagine a scenario where the damage and degradation are dealt differently.

Are the International Tribunals of Rights of Nature pluriversal?

Until here I have shown that the ITRN aim at offering a different paradigm to the environmental agenda not without important shortcomings. They claim to be non-anthropocentric and rely on indigenous experiences and their cosmologies as well as from experts from different backgrounds, to reframe the logics for actual solutions to climate change. However, is this a liberal ‘ontological capture’? Do they cause the same ontological slippages, or can we speak of the tribunals as pluriversal and as a space for cosmopolitics? In this section I describe how the Tribunals open the space to such practices. Different participants bring their worlds and worldviews as the hearings take place.

Sessions begin with indigenous rituals which have a performative impact. At the European Tribunal for Aquatic Systems, hearings began with an indigenous ritual that refers to water as a central actor that reminds us that we are water, we come from water and our survival depends on it. Attendants take part in the ritual by holding a glass of water and raise it while the presiding judge Goldtooth ⁶² sings, and then are invited to share that water with the earth pouring some of it and drinking the rest. Goldtooth’s words refer to water:

Water is sacred and needs to be respected and honoured. Water gives life to all, to our food and medicines, it is the melody and the rhythm of life, it has its own voice, personality, and intelligence, it has different songs that shares with us in constant movement of regeneration. ⁶³

The 5th International Tribunal in Glasgow, 2021 began with indigenous rituals of blessing. Leaders and representatives of Amazonian peoples, wearing and using symbols of authority and origin ⁶⁴ hold hands and invite assistants to stand up while affirming:

We are here raising our voices for those who cannot speak but feel like us.

We are here for those who are not born yet.

We are here for those who cannot defend themselves.

We are here to speak about those feelings and concerns we have about life ⁶⁵

It is hard to describe the energy of the venue as the hearings continue. One after another, participants show maps, statistics, charts, photos, and videos of their damaged livelihoods. They provide evidence on how – legal and illegal – activities like mining, lodging, fracking, geoengineering affect their worlds, witnessing the incapacity or complicity of states and governments. They tell their experiences in developing different strategies of defence, conservation and struggle, their successes, and failures. In telling their stories they reveal the limitations of local and national authorities, and the shortcomings of activism. They use the ITRN as a platform to denounce, to recreate and to be heard. Silence reigns among the attendants. It is difficult to express this sense of collective loss and impotence on a written paper. There is also hope.

The exerts of the testimonies I quote in the following pages are an attempt to transmit this as accurately as possible. The reader may have to follow Stengers’ advice of slowing down reasoning and avoid the temptation of interpreting them according to the default settings, giving space for the interstices, the in-betweenness.

In the ways participants express themselves, and how they speak, it is possible to see that their intention in being at the hearing is nothing like what a court-like hearing would be. For example, during the hearing on the Amazon Case Gregorio Mirabal, a representative of Amazon Indigenous communities calls the spirit of the Amazon and the ancestors, the jaguar and the anaconda, the rivers and the millions of beings that are in the trees, under the water in the wind and in the fire. This call is not rhetoric or metaphoric, it invokes the spirits of such beings, it brings their worlds. In his speech it is possible to see that Mirabal’s is worlding a pluriverse constituted by humans and other-than-humans, where temporalities like past, present, and future are deeply interconnected. ⁶⁶ Calling these other beings, the spiritual, the sacred, implies their participation as people of interest in what goes on in the hearings. To bring the spiritual up would not normally proceed in an anthropocentric court ⁶⁷ and yet it is not only inherent for relational cosmologies and Indigenous peoples, but key to understand the deep and complex connections that constitute our relationship with nature.

Another example is the following affirmation by Judge Raffensperger in the Case False Solutions to Climate Change: ‘We must make decisions with the seventh generation in mind, think of other species as our kin’. ⁶⁸ Summoning ‘the absent’ and the other-than-human is as relevant as any other action taken, but in the case of engaging with the pluriverse it becomes particularly important because it creates a mind shift in the atmosphere and prepares the audience to listen in a different way. As the hearings begin, it becomes evident that this will not be a traditional climate change presentation, nor will it be a traditional court-like hearing: this is something else, these practices world something else.

The background of each presenter and convener is also significant in how they perform and act. As court-like trial, people practice and perform as judges, witnesses, experts. Assuming a role has a transformative effect on them. ⁶⁹ Judge Cullinan has argued that ‘this is more about ways of being and doing than the right thing to do’. ⁷⁰ Considering the sessions of the tribunals as worldings more than just hearings, the scope and the other dimensions of the tribunals become more evident:

When our homelands are in good health, our peoples are healthy. Alliances are being formed as you see now in this tribunal. Groups and individuals committed to create a system of jurisprudences to protect earth. This is based on Indigenous knowledge and traditions. . .Two legal systems hand by hand. A relationship of respecting and understanding natural law and spiritual authorities. ⁷¹

Participants come from different realities and act accordingly, they come with their worlds, and somehow this difference coexists for the couple of hours the hearing lasts. For example, the previous testimonies of Mirabal and Raffensperger refer to the non-human. These two participants play distinct roles as case presenter and judge, but they world different worlds although it seems that they are talking about the non-human in the same way. Their worlds are different, but there is an understanding that is not based on a common assumption but on a sense that somewhere in between they are meeting each other, here is a portal.

Other-than-human act as victims, witnesses, and the experts too, and different ontologies interact. Participants do not engage in a debate to discuss the ontology of nature or delve into conceptualizations, rather they share their experiences without trying to highlight their narrative over anothers’. Testimonies refer to different domains, some of them are very tangible (geographically showing the specific location of river dams and gas burners), some refer to the intangible, the spiritual, or the forest as a house. To achieve this, to bind back together the manifest domain (nature, society) and the spiritual domain (inhabited by spirits, ancestors, and the sacred), ⁷² is key for pluriversal relationality.

For example, for Indigenous leaders like Domingo Peas, there will be no solution to environmental damage without taking the spiritual domain into account:

We know what to do and we have the solutions, we do not need more diagnosis or assessments nor scientific proofs, we need to move forward and act. We need to teach to those who have forgotten, about the importance of the spiritual, otherwise, it will not be done. ⁷³

Spirituality is one of the diverse ways through which people accept that nature is a living creature.

On the other hand, as a non-jurisdictional and more a political actor, the ITRN operate on a flexible basis (they flow according to what comes to the hearings). Flexibility is a key aspect in relationality because it explains processes of transformation and becoming that end up affecting reality. ⁷⁴ This has allowed participants to combine areas, having a broader effect and allowing to recognize interconnections more fluidly, which would not be easy in a jurisdictional court. There is an example in the French Guiana Case (2021), after listening to the testimony of the indigenous chief Tiuoka (witness and case presenter), judge Goldtooth reacts to the fact that France has not ratified the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as for the tribunals humans are of nature, if humans are not fully recognized (indigenous peoples in French territory) like in this case, there is – in extension – a violation of the river’s rights. The same works the other way around, by protecting the river’s rights, human survival, and livelihoods are preserved. The possibility of interchanging subjects, bringing in songs and rituals shows flexibility in the process and a sense or appropriation of the space and procedures by all the participants. The tribunals provide a space for listening ⁷⁵ enabling another bridge or portal, Emotions and other means of expression seem to be central too. Case Lake Vättern ends with a traditional song that describes life around the lake. Sung by the witness Bjorstrand, ⁷⁶ this changes the mindset after hearing all the damage caused to the lake, as a reminder that sometimes other languages express some experiences better. The Amazon Case begins with a song of the Kuna people that talks about the people of the world and the spirits of mother earth. In Western legal procedures, however, under the logic of extreme rationalization, actors must build a case based on facts and evidence, and ultimately on law. These scenarios do not allow for emotions to take place. ⁷⁷

Being in a world where you can articulate and understand and feel your feelings about the earth is a larger goal. I think is really critical. You are marginalized as being sort of a child of how people call me that I am immature and need to grow up. Like somehow being an adult means denying this whole part of yourself. I would love to see us get past that and really feel much more in kinship and relationship and empathetic with the earth and with ourselves. ⁷⁸

Attending these hearings is a highly emotional experience. To learn from others the level of destruction that occurs all over the world, causes impotence against the power of states and corporations. Change occurs when hearts are open to awareness and another type of conscience that eventually leads to change in human behavior. ⁷⁹ As a space for songs and stories, emotions connect and create empathy. This is one important stake for the ITRN, a way to mobilize audiences.

The following testimonies about knowledge, representation, and rights show the importance of emotions:

I am Achuar, from the Ecuadorian Amazon, I am a witness because when I was 4 years old, I suffered from the case of the oil extractors, when they came with an engine, and I suffered as a kid. Since then – I am 55 years old – I know the sad reality of oil exploitation. I am a teacher, a lecturer. . .for 30 years I have been involved in the process of Indigenous organization. I really know what has happened throughout that trajectory and I serve with respect and honour as a witness. All the Indigenous are from nature and are consequent with the rights of nature. Different nations of nine countries have organized to defend the right of nature and we have within us that. . .we know that the rivers, all the visible and invisible beings that are in nature have the right to live and exist. We must educate this modern world. ⁸⁰

The interconnection between knowledge and emotion is deeply relational, it is a sentipensar (feeling/thinking) ⁸¹ which is a key to understand the ‘facts’ and to bridge what appears to be incompatible beliefs about them. Here, scientific modern knowledge is politicised and ancestral, emotional and life experience knowledges are of relevance, especially when judges consider that it is important to bridge and connect diverse sources and kinds of knowledges. ⁸²

I think that science in a way that is much more open, and less reductionist can be one way to do that, but unfortunately right now [Western] science is not structured to do that. [It] generally does[es] not look at full systems and understand them more holistically. I was talking with an indigenous representative in Australia, . . . [who] said that I forgot about the spirits, and the right of the spirits to move along with the river.

In these expressions and worldings a latent pluriverse comes into scene, revealing an interstice that made possible because of the multiplicity in approaches to rights, representation, and knowledge. Some actors consider emotions an important source of knowledge, for others, love, and respect for earth and the need to protect her translate into law and proceedings. Emotions play different purposes, here is another portal.

The hearings of the tribunal are encounters of worlds. This helps not only to see things differently but to see other things. The space in-between where interaction of worlds begins. But this is possible because ITRN are still a political space where difference is enacted and negotiated differently, ⁸³ and not a formal court.

In this sense the tribunals reach other goals, not reduced only to environmental issues.

Judge Mead affirms: ‘I believe that our main task at this time beyond any possible techno fix is to open our hearts and our minds to our own embodied wisdom, I am talking about the embodied wisdom that moves through us and is incorruptible part of being human of being nature, which we are, which not even western education system can remove from us when we choose to start listening again. ⁸⁴

They have the potential to change hearts, minds, disposition, and sensibilities, which also occurs in quite diverse ways: from ‘hard evidence’ to rituals, singing, to personal stories and ancestral stories. Judges are convinced that their role does not inly involve taking a decision. ⁸⁵ They allow for plural knowledges, experiences, and visions to take place, and as actors from different backgrounds and places, their contribution is also plural and diverse: for some, natural entities are fully recognized and members of the collective, for others, it is still hard to think of other-than-humans as entitled with rights and struggle to think of them as something different than things or products.

In the hearings Tribunals bridge these ontological differences, where participants perform relationships with nature in different ways. They also show distinct levels of affectation: from traditional methods where experts and scientists show evidence of degradation with charts, figures, laboratory results, photography, and quantitative data, to emotional and symbolic gestures and songs that express loss, love, affection, rage, mourning, and sadness. This contributes to amplify the register on how damage is experienced and lived by beings affected directly or indirectly, providing important means to understand human and non-human interconnection.

As for whether the ITRN are a liberal co-optation and assimilation of indigenous ontologies, it is worth noting that Indigenous participants use the tribunals strategically, as a platform where they can raise their voices, but their interventions also vary according to their own experiences and have more to do with claims related to power relations, particularly with the state and corporations, than to talk on behalf of nature. ‘Labeling’ is the ontological slippage we can transform into bridges once we slow reasoning and are aware of the in-betweenness. Some Indigenous claim to be closer to nature and knowing their needs. They do not discuss nature as a subject or as a being, which is and ontological given. One should understand this carefully, because to some degree they use western language to go as close as what their reality is.

Tribunals seem to enable what Verran calls postcolonial moments. Such moments,

Effect an opening up and loosening, increasing possibilities for cooperation while respecting difference, postcolonial moments can lead to making amends for past injustice. Elaborating a postcolonial moment involves both making separations and connecting by identifying sameness. But ‘sameness’ here is not a dominating universalizing. On the contrary, sameness in a postcolonial moment enables difference to be collectively enacted. ⁸⁶

The ITRN can be a space where these reconnections can take place as ways of encounters of diverse groups wounded by coloniality in similar but also in different ways. Acknowledging this enables the transformation from ontological slippages to default settings to bridging worlds. The tribunals can be a decolonial exercise of reconnecting. They produce ‘different sameness’ when actors refer to other-than-humans as beings like humans, as subjects entitled with some rights, or as nature as an object. It is precisely this what explains why the tribunals may be eco-centered, liberal and pluriversal at the same time, a relational both/and instead of an atomistic either/or. ⁸⁷

By taking into consideration other-than-human domains, ITRN bring the discussion further and beyond classical approaches to environmental governance, ⁸⁸ even those that are considered innovative, new, or alternative. ⁸⁹ This responds to claims for the need of other paradigms ⁹⁰ that upset colonial legacies on climate change. ⁹¹ But additionally, in a broader sense, it contributes to theorize and think about the ‘problem of difference’ in IR, ⁹² a crucial aspect that helps to understand climate and environmental challenges from the margins, ⁹³ to engage with different ways of being and to come up with solutions to tackle environmental damage that work better for this plural planet. ⁹⁴

Hearings allow interstices of interaction. This happens in the ways people interact. Although adding different voices to create a common discourse about nature can be an initial attempt in the planning of the event, in the documents and declarations, these small portals where no single world imposes itself over the others; instead, they overlap and coexist, however briefly.

Conclusion

This paper has suggested that the claims against the RoN movement and the Tribunal about being another modern and liberal logics of co-optation of non-western approaches needs to be taken seriously. This should not mean to automatically jump into the conclusion that they do. The ‘fast’ assumption restricts our capacity for listening/seeing more carefully, for slowing down reasoning. We are rushing into a conclusion, slipping back to default settings without trying to see the interstices.

The tribunals are portals that bridge worlds. Hence, they are not simply hybrid. This, however, does not mean that these tribunals are in fact pluriversal, at least not yet. Instead, ITRN constitute a space where different worlds can interact. This interaction is sometimes translated and interpreted in binary ways either liberal or Indigenous/eco-centric. Relationally understood, the ITRN combine the manifestation of plural worlds, where both Western/liberal readings of nature interact with pluriversal and relational approaches. Relationally they are both western/modern and potentially pluriversal, illustrating the coexistence of difference in tension. The ITRN show that this is deeper than that and bigger than any environmental agenda; what they enable is the discussion and encounter of different worlds. Other institutions could adopt this to put in conversation different worlds.

This analysis of ITRN contributes to reveal what is frequently lost or hidden in dominant approaches and to re-ground international relations. This discussion is not only about how to rethink the environmental agenda, but also, and more deeply how to transform the ontological assumptions that underlie them.