IHE Delft 💧Alumni online seminar Rights of Nature: Reflections of Possibilities

About the seminar Moving beyond approaches that treat nature as property or a resource to be governed, Rights of Nature redefines the legal relationship between humans and nature by recognising nature as a rights-bearing entity. As the movement expands globally, a key challenge is understanding its origins, meaning, legal implications, and transformative potential. This seminar situates the emergence of Rights of Nature within pluriversal challenges rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems and customary legal traditions, while questioning whether the movement can also reproduce colonial dynamics by simplifying Indigenous ontologies and detracting from Indigenous rights. Participants will explore the origins, evolution, global development, and challenges of Rights of Nature, examining where and why it has emerged, who has promoted it, the legal pathways through which it has developed, and the motivations behind its adoption. The seminar will address key questions at the heart of the movement: Who or what can hold rights? Who is driving the Rights of Nature? Can it foster relational ontologies with the Earth and ecological systems? To what extent does it decolonise environmental governance and challenge dominant Western conceptions of development? Drawing on contrasting case studies from Colombia, Ecuador, New Zealand, and Spain, the seminar will critically examine the varied manifestations of Rights of Nature, reflecting on their achievements, limitations, and potential to transform environmental governance. About the Speaker Gabriela Cuadrado-Quesada is Associate Professor of Water Rights and Justice at IHE Delft. Her research and teaching activities focus on the legal and institutional dimensions of water at both the local and national levels, the role of community organisations in using legal instruments to promote environmental justice and sustainable use of water, the connections between community water practices and legal instruments, the relations between environmental destruction, food production and water pollution as well as the linkages between international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international refugee law. Prior to joining IHE Delft, Cuadrado-Quesada was a PhD fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney Australia. Her doctoral research focuses on groundwater governance, looking in particular at how the design and implementation of legal frameworks shape groundwater governance in practice; and how and to what extent law and practice are interwoven. Additionally, she has extensive experience working for various non-governmental organizations in Costa Rica and India and as an environmental litigator in Costa Rica. ……………………………………………………………………………….