This chapter considers how, with animals recognised as a part of nature, legally enshrined ‘rights of nature’ could provide a basis for animals’ legal subjecthood. The chapter centres on the case of Estrellita, an Ecuadorean woolly monkey who was declared to be a subject of rights under Ecuador’s constitutionally enshrined rights of ‘pachamama’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Yet, while Estrellita’s case highlights the potential for rights of nature to serve as a source of animals’ legal subjectivity, the chapter stresses caution. First, several rights-of-nature provisions have arguably co-opted Indigenous ideas, and served to justify continued resource extraction under the guise of living in balance with nature. Second, rights-of-nature provisions maintain the ontological human/all-other-nature divide that exists in current legal systems. Finally, the rights of nature may operate as a kind of ‘eco-coverture’ by encapsulating the interests of individual animals within the sphere of nature’s interests, thereby limiting the potential scope of animals’ legal protection. The chapter concludes that we can do better than grounding animals’ legal subjecthood in the rights of nature.

Bolivia inherited arrangements that dispossessed its indigenous peoples, and this system persisted through decades of military rule and discord until a civilian government sought decentralisation in the mid-1990s. This attracted Danish support through Danida and, as it involved indigenous peoples to whom restoration of land rights was of critical concern, Danish efforts to secure these rights became a key theme. This grew into a community land-titling process that matched the aims of a movement which swept indigenous leader Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism to power in 2006. Denmark’s support for community land titling was a central priority of the new government, and the effect of its 1995–2010 programme was to transform the map of Bolivia in favour of Indigenous peoples. Their forest territories largely survived the later onslaught of plantation development, preventing the release of billions of tonnes of carbon while saving immeasurable biodiversity and ecological and cultural resources. Danida may not have fully appreciated its contribution and it left the community land sector prematurely, but Bolivia is now in a much stronger position than before to resist climate chaos, with a viable plurinational constitution and many relatively safe territorial forests and empowered Indigenous peoples.