- The Amazon cannot be saved by legal recognition alone. Declaring the forest a subject of rights is historic, but without real authority for Indigenous governments, these rights risk remaining largely symbolic.
- Protecting the forest requires shared governance: national ministries, regional agencies, and local governments must coordinate decisions with Indigenous authorities who already govern vast Amazonian territories — and protect the knowledge systems that have sustained it for generations.
- The limited implementation of the ruling recognizing the Amazon as a subject of rights reflects the gap between judicial decisions and realities on the ground, as well as the political and social complexity of the Amazon across territorial, national, regional, and international scales.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.
In October 2023, a delegation of La Gente de Centro — the Andoke (Pɵɵsiɵhɵ), Nonuya (Nonova), Muinane (Féénemɨnaa) and Uitoto (Nɨpode) peoples of the Middle Caquetá River Basin — traveled from the Colombian Amazon to Bogotá.
They came not as petitioners but as authorities of living territories, demanding the implementation of Supreme Court Ruling 4360 of 2018, which recognized the Amazon as a subject of rights. Seven years after the ruling, however, the forest continues to burn, rivers silt up, and the agricultural frontier advances.
Their visit raised a simple but unsettling question: what does it mean to recognize the rights of the Amazon if the peoples who have governed these forests for millennia remain outside the decisions that shape their future?
In the territories they inhabit, authority is not concentrated in a single institution but woven through relationships among peoples, forests, rivers and other living beings. Protecting the Amazon, their presence suggested, requires forms of governance able to move across these interconnected scales of life and authority.
Recognizing the Amazon as a subject of rights is therefore an important step but it is not enough. Judicial recognition must be accompanied by genuine co-governance with Indigenous authorities and by treating Indigenous life plans and governance systems as binding frameworks for territorial decision-making, rather than merely consultative inputs to state policy.
This requires joint decision-making across several levels of government. National ministries responsible for climate and forest policy must work directly with Indigenous authorities, while regional environmental agencies, departmental governments, and municipalities must coordinate their land-use and development plans with Indigenous territorial governance, which in many Amazonian areas already exercises effective authority.
In this sense, our argument resonates with the diagnosis of Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman about the mismatch between planetary-scale crises and governance systems centered on the nation-state. Their proposal of “planetary subsidiarity” — governance distributed across interconnected scales — points toward arrangements that echo the distributed authority long practiced in Indigenous territories. Initiatives such as the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (MAPI), created under the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, also move in this direction by seeking to strengthen Indigenous participation across the entire Amazon Basin.
The experience of La Gente de Centro makes these challenges visible in practice. In Bogotá, their delegation insisted that recognizing the rights of the forest cannot be separated from recognizing the authority of the peoples who sustain it. Two years later, they carried the same message to the 2025 U.N. climate conference in Belém, Brazil. The journey from Colombia’s courts to global climate negotiations was not a change in scale but a continuation of the same struggle.
As Jorge Ortiz, a traditional authority of the Muinane people, explained, “We want to exchange knowledge with non-Indigenous society, but many times they only come to our territories to extract resources and seek profit.”
The Colombian experience also shows the limits of such mechanisms: even binding mandates like Supreme Court Ruling 4360 face major obstacles in implementation. From Bogotá to Belém, La Gente de Centro thus remind us that the Amazon cannot be governed through a single legal or institutional order but through cooperation among the many authorities that sustain it.
At the local level, La Gente de Centro insist that the forest’s rights cannot be separated from the rights of its peoples. For them, the Amazon is not an object of protection but a polity: a living network of beings bound by reciprocal obligations.
“When Indigenous peoples lose their knowledge, the Amazon will cease to exist,” warned Hernán Moreno, a leader of the Nonuya people.
His words expose a core blind spot of Western environmental law: biodiversity cannot be sustained without biocultural continuity, and the survival of the forest depends on the knowledges, practices and responsibilities that have governed it since time immemorial.
At the national level, Ruling 4360 sought to halt deforestation and safeguard the rights of future generations by recognizing the Amazon as a subject of rights within Colombia’s constitutional order. Yet its uneven implementation reveals the limits of the country’s institutional architecture. Protecting the Amazon requires more than judicial declarations; it demands structural transformations in governance, territorial planning, and economic policy.
For this reason, assessing a structural judgment like Ruling 4360 cannot be reduced to an all-or-nothing balance. Its effects unfold through political and institutional dynamics that exceed the courtroom — and it is precisely within those spaces that Indigenous authorities continue to be positioned as stakeholders rather than as co-governing actors of territory.
Before the Bogotá Court, the delegation demanded effective participation in designing and monitoring the ruling, access to transparent information, and recognition of their rights to self-determination and free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Beneath these procedural claims lay a deeper tension: the encounter between two legal orders. The state conceives of nature as a resource to be managed; Indigenous governance tends to understand it as a living totality. One seeks to regulate the forest, the other listens to it.
This existential conflict resurfaced in Belém, where La Gente de Centro joined other Amazonian peoples to denounce the failures of climate mechanisms such as REDD+. Under the language of collaboration, carbon offset schemes have often displaced Indigenous authorities from decision-making over their own territories.
“The word of life teaches us to care for, manage, respect, and value nature,” the elders reminded the Bogotá Court — underscoring that what is at stake is not merely participation in policy, but the recognition of Indigenous authority as a governing force in climate action.
Across international legal and diplomatic arenas, the experience of La Gente de Centro reveals a persistent tension in climate governance. What is presented as dialogue often becomes a misalignment of worlds, as state institutions translate Indigenous concepts in ways that dilute their meaning.
This tension is visible in the implementation of Supreme Court Ruling 4360. The ruling triggered an unprecedented institutional response: more than 90 state agencies became involved, environmental sectors began coordinating their efforts, and the National Council for the Fight Against Deforestation (CONALDEF) was created.
Yet progress remains uneven. Only one of the ruling’s four main orders shows significant compliance, while key mandates — including the Intergenerational Pact for the Life of the Colombian Amazon (PIVAC) — remain largely unfulfilled. Although deforestation trends fluctuate and recent monitoring suggests some reductions, the broader governance architecture envisioned by the ruling has struggled to take hold: of the 61 Amazonian municipalities, only nine have updated their land-use plans, revealing the difficulty of translating judicial mandates into coordinated action across the Amazon’s multilevel political landscape.
These limitations stem not only from weak implementation but also from the ruling’s design. Supreme Court Ruling 4360 assumes a relatively uniform territory, while the Amazon is a highly diverse region where more than 52 Indigenous peoples coexist with their own governance systems. In many areas, Indigenous governments exercise effective territorial authority, yet the ruling relies mainly on state administrative categories such as municipal planning and regional environmental agencies.
This mismatch helps explain the implementation gap. The PIVAC mandate requires coordination across jurisdictions and must be built with Amazonian peoples and organizations, but the ruling itself was not designed to fully engage with the territorial governance systems already operating in the region.
From the riverbanks of the Caquetá River to the U.N. plenaries of Belém, the struggle of La Gente de Centro shows that Amazonian cosmopolitics are not merely local but planetary. Their experience reveals a form of governance capable of confronting the climate emergency precisely because it refuses the separation between nature and culture, between law and life.
The Amazon’s multispecies relations constitute a living jurisprudence that unsettles the anthropocentrism of international law and its climate regimes. Between the courtrooms of Bogotá and the negotiation halls of Belém, their word remains unchanged: the Amazon lives through its peoples, and any form of governance that silences them is already a form of destruction.
Banner image: Military police and Indigenous protestors at the Belo Monte Dam construction site in 2013. Image by Ruy Sposati /Agência Raízes via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Paulo Ilich Bacca is academic environmental director of Dejusticia and member of the Amazonian Network of Networks. Luisa Fernanda Bacca is co-director of the Pan-Amazonian Institute (IPA) and member of the Amazonian Network of Networks.
If all life mattered, what would decision-making look like? (Analysis)
Citation:
Andoke Andoke, L., Arazi, E., Castro Suárez, H., Griffiths, T. F., & Gutiérrez Sánchez, E. (2023). Amazonian visions of vision Amazonia: Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives on a forest conservation and climate programme in the Colombian Amazon. Oryx, 57(3), 335-349. doi:10.1017/s0030605322001636
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