Dale, John G. 2025. “Corporate Accountability and the Ecological Turn: Mining Lessons from the Rights of Nature Movement,” in Raluca Grosesçu and John G. Dale, eds., Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Action across the World (Series on Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol.16, Springer Nature, Cham, Switzerland), pp. 73-100. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05569-9_4

As Big Tech-driven development of artificial intelligence and data mining becomes increasingly entangled with traditional practices of extractivist mining for oil, gas, coal, and precious metals and minerals, the corporate accountability movement now must take into consideration (living and non-living) nonhuman rights to adequately defend and mobilise support for the humans, communities, ecosystems, and knowledge being impacted. Drawing on relational approaches to rights projects, this chapter examines a transnational, Indigenous-led rights of nature movement in Ecuador that successfully pre-empted the rights and extractive practices of transnational and state-owned mining corporations while creating new rights to protect Indigenous communities, the Amazonian forests they inhabit, and novel legal forms of data ownership. I then compare this case to a U.S.-focused corporate accountability movement that had separately and differently constructed rights of nature to challenge corporate rights of extractivist development. I demonstrate how the rights of nature project in Ecuador subsequently engaged and influenced this U.S.-based rights project, including its relational discourse on rights of nature and community, political aims and strategies of corporate accountability, and its movement identity.