Rights of Nature (RoN), an emerging legal paradigm that attributes legal rights to natural entities like rivers and mountains, seeks to upend Anthropocentric ideas of property and intrinsic value. The effects of its potential disruption of traditional rights attribution and environmental protection norms has been a growing body of research in both social science and legal fields; however, calls for more research about the RoN’s ability to proliferate are still common.

Based on an interdisciplinary approach combining constructivist theories of norm contestation and dominant principles of environmental law, I aimed to measure RoN-related norm diffusion on the global stage as a potential signal for future institutionalization. For this purpose, I conducted an extensive discourse analysis combining top-down, dictionary-based approaches and few-shot text classification using the GPT 3.5-turbo model on the United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), which includes all general debate speeches from 1946 to 2023. In doing so, I visualized trends and correlations between countries and their references to environmental norms and validated them against previous works in norm contestation and diffusion. Most importantly, I argue that those who have referenced ecocentric and biocentric norms on the international stage are predominantly those who have already taken or will take domestic action to implement them.