Who are going to help us now? Challenges of implementation in the new environmental rights (¿Y ahora quién podrá ayudarnos?. Los desafíos que plantea la implementación de los nuevos derechos de la naturaleza)

In the last decade, we have witnessed how courts in different parts of the world, have ruled in favor of the protection of the nature. The most celebrated and so-called innovative decisions regarding these protections are those that have declared that nature is not a thing but a person with legal standing. In this paper, I focus on two of these rulings in Colombia to understand what are the possibilities of effectiveness of the judicial orders. The first one is the Atrato River ruling by the Constitutional Court; the second one, is the Supreme Court ruling on the Amazon. While both rulings have been recognized as the same type of decision in which nature is now a holder of rights, the mechanisms designed in the rulings to assure the effectiveness are radically different. According to collective action theories, I analyze how the way in which the litigation was structured and the recipients of the remedies ordered have an impact on the implementation of the rulings.