ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Latin American and Caribbean countries provide strategies for creating institutional architecture, procedural mechanisms, substantive definitions, transparency and accountability to the environment to deter political manipulations. It examines constitutional environmental rights (CERs) through the critical lens of the sociology of human rights, and by integrating overlapping debates in environmental sociology. The sociology of human rights provides new ways to understand and explain the intersections of constitutional politics, socio-economic policies and cultural programs, and social and environmental justice movements that shape the environmental trajectories of countries in the Americas. The chapter investigates the part of the rights cycle of most interest to sociologists, how countries implement environmental rights claims into the political system as CERs. The 2008 Ecuadorean Constitution's "protection of environment" is also one of the strongest in Latin America. Bolivia's "Protection of the environment" is among the two most expansive compared to every other nation in the Latin American and Caribbean regions.
