Rights of nature and natural commons: Analysis of some conceptual tensions in the light of the Chilean case

The notion of commons has been reintroduced into the contemporary legal-political vocabulary, but there is much confusion about its meaning. In this article I attempt to offer some classificatory criteria that may be useful in distinguishing diverse uses of the concept. A distinction is made between "natural and social" approaches to the commons, and between "localist and globalist" conceptions. This followed by an analysis of these conceptual tensions in relation to the inclusion of the rights of nature and the natural commons in the Chilean Constitutional Convention of 2022. It concludes with a response to the local/global aporia of the commons, based on Bruno Latour's idea of the "terrestrial".