Abstract
Ecuador’s 2008 constitution is fundamentally aspirational in terms of the environmental rights it guarantees. In Ecuador, social rights have received immediate implementation priority, even though their implementation, financed through resource extraction revenues, has required the government to trade off against stringent enforcement of environmental rights. Thus, the enforcement of the rights of nature to date is more akin to executive enforcement of environmental regulation than that of a rigid constitutional assurance to a particular right. Such a tradeoff can be characterized as a political economy of constitutional rights implementation. The analysis of rights implementation in Ecuador further suggests that environmental rights provisions can be particularly subject to rights tradeoffs, and regimes with a dominant veto player can be more able to engage in rights tradeoffs than others.