Archive for category: News

PhD researcher Laura Giraldo-Martínez, who is investigating the materialization of diverse socio-ecological memories in river infrastructures in the headwaters of the Bogotá River through an action research approach, has been engaged in a fruitful collaboration with the entre-ríos collective. During the past months, Laura and the collective have carried out a series of river walks along the Bogotá River, and, more recently, have realized an event.

Inspired by the efforts of various care actions, last April 26, the researcher and the collective met at Tequendama Falls to exchange restorations and reparation experiences. This event marked a significant point in a long-term project which aims to co-create a digital platform using film, podcasts, and publications to tell the stories of inspirational community leaders living and working on the Bogotá River. Click here to know more about what happened that day (in Spanish).

The recent UN Water Conference sparked an international momentum for debating water governance. Though not physically present, different researchers of the Riverhood and River Commons projects engaged in preparatory activities and discussions in order to place water justice high on the agenda. Early this year, during the biannual congress of the Spanish New Water Culture Foundation, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation Dr. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, coordinated with researchers Prof. Rutgerd Boelens, Dr. Bibiana Duarte and Dr. Jerry van den Berge to prepare for the UN Water Conference in New York. His objective was to position water as a human right while integrating this with a new perspective on rivers as socio-ecological entities – a key conceptualization of our projects (more information here). Besides, Riverhood and River Commons contributed to and co-signed the “Declaration of Commitments”(by the organizing members of the UN of Rivers, Deltas and Estuaries) and the “Transformative Water Pact” (initiated by environmental justice organization Both ENDS and water knowledge institute IHE-Delft). We hope that these important initiatives contribute to raising attention for water justice and the need to drastically rethink river relations and practices!

 

The Bogotá river isn’t dead. Despite decades of being declared a liquid corpse, communities from its highland sources to the dramatic Tequendama Falls are taking action to care for this polluted body of water.

For centuries, the river has been the life source and energy for inhabitants of Bogota’s flat savannah. The Indigenous Muiscas worked with water to create navigation channels and raised bed agriculture. Modern irrigation systems siphon the flow to farmers for their crops. And the nation’s first hydropower plant tapped the river to generate electricity that lit up Colombia’s growing capital city at the start of modernity.

Everyone is connected to the river. But media images that focus only on lethal contamination and water treatment infrastructure risk disconnecting Bogotá’s inhabitants from their river, turning it into a lost cause. We want to shift the narrative and tell different stories about this river, focusing on the people that care for it.

In a collaboration between the entre—ríos collective and the River Commons project of Wageningen University, we followed the Bogotá River from its source in the Guacheneque highlands to the cloud forest of the Tequendama Falls region in Cundinamarca.

By walking the river and listening closely to communities over the course of a week, we connected with grassroots water management and wetland restoration groups, environmental education, and art projects. In the confluences of different practices of care, this polluted river comes back to life.

We encountered a river network woven through water and land, in the biodiversity that grows in this amphibious ecosystem, and in the community relationships that make possible its restoration, rehabilitation, and conservation.

by Lisa Blackmore, entre—ríos, University of Essex; Laura Giraldo-Martínez, PhD researcher River Commons project Wageningen University; Diego Piñeros García, visual artist; Juliana Steiner, curator.

 

 

 

Country and location of the photo story: Bogotá River, Cundinamarca Department, Colombia.

The group of master students meets at Casa Migrante in Amsterdam, a non-profit organization that supports Spanish-speaking immigrants who live in and around Amsterdam. They already all seem so comfortable as it is not their first time here. The students have become acquainted with some aspects of the South American countries that they will go to for their Master’s thesis or internship. In the encounter space for intercultural exchange between Latin-American immigrants, the students have a last meeting to conclude before they will depart. They are the first group of master students that participates in the River Commons Master Student Exchange Program. After several preparatory meetings during one semester, they are now ready to depart to their different study sites in South America. All with their own focus of study on the main topic of rivers, river co-governance, and water justice movements.

As part of their preparatory activities they not only held discussions about development, positionality, and environmental justice, but they also had a first introduction to Casa Migrante and Parroquia San Nicolas as a dynamic interchange between cultures and knowledge. Collaborating organizations shared real-life examples through presentations and lively discussions on topics such as intercultural communication, community engagement, and critical self-reflection. More than once the question arose: “what will be your role, position, and also, your contribution?” and following “how will this be part of your research”?.

Soon, the students will arrive at their study sites, in Ecuador and Colombia, where they will all conduct their field research. Some focus on more social sciences aspects, others on natural sciences. Still, all of them include cross-cultural exchange, connection, and reflection. For at least 3 months, they will engage with local communities, NGOs, and other stakeholders to jointly study innovative river-commoning approaches and methodologies. From a participatory action research approach, students will support and collaborate in riverine grassroots initiatives aimed to protect and restore rivers.

In a couple of months from now, upon their return, the students will communicate their learned lessons and intercultural insights to audiences in their home community, for example through experience-discussion meetings on social equality, sustainable water governance, and environmental justice. This intercultural connection is important to all partners: The INREF-collaborating WUR chair groups and study programs, CEDLA/UvA, Week Nederlandse Missionaris, Casa Migrante, Parroquia San Nicolás Amsterdam, and different NGOs around the world. They jointly stress the programs’ focus on issues of North-South solidarities, common good, ethics, human and nature’s rights, social inequalities and discrimination, and the diversity of cultural values, cosmovisions, and spiritual dimensions.

In 2023, the Masters’ exchange program will focus on consolidating the exchange programs’ setup and methodology taking into account the lessons learned from the first cohort. Specifically, the following activities will take place:

1. Implementation and consolidation of the program with partner institutes, based on the lessons learned from 2022.
2. Supervision of students who are now in the field.
3. Establishment of new exchange opportunities with other NGOs and local actors
4. Identification and arrangement of the counter-exchange-visit of 8 Colombian students to the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, the students who have arrived in Colombia and Ecuador recently, engage with their host organization partners and exchange with youngsters back home: inspiring stories about intercultural.

In this interview for NWO, the Dutch Research Council, Rutgerd Boelens talks about how the Riverhood and River Commons projects address social and environmental challenges, specifically focusing on water management, and their interconnection with issues of knowledge and power.

“‘Around the globe, water management is riddled with colonial concepts that are dominating other views,’ explains Boelens. ‘One of the most important ideas is that “Society can be engineered”. It is an implicit idea behind lots of scientific research and behind many development interventions that non-Western societies are somehow ‘less civilized’ and that progress can only be achieved there by modernizing systems and breaking with the past.’

Boelens explains that it is typical for these western mission-like projects to use terms such as ‘best practices’ and ‘good governance’. ‘As if there are universal solutions that you can simply copy from one part of the world and paste them onto another part of the world,’ he says. In water management, there are many cases where private and marketable water rights are introduced based on the idea that this is modernization. This means that water can be owned individually and bought and sold.”

See the full article here: “Knowledge that does not undermine anyone”

On 27 October, Carlota Houart, PhD researcher at the Riverhood project, participated in the Deep Commons Conference 2022 as part of the panel “Towards multispecies justice”, to present her research proposal, Listening to the Voices of the River: Towards Multispecies Justice in Water Governance Processes. The Deep Commons Conference theme this year was “Cultivating Ecologies of Solidarity and Care beyond Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism and the State”, and more information about the program and the variety of panel, workshop, and roundtable contributions from researchers, activists, artists and others around the globe can be found here: https://www.deepcommons.net/conference-2022.

Carlota’s presentation focused on the emergent concept and research program of multispecies justice, and how it can be applied to the study of the interests and practices of social movements and local communities mobilizing to defend and restore river ecosystems. By reflecting on recent experiences with preliminary fieldwork in the context of the Dutch river Maas, Carlota also pointed to a few ethical questions surrounding research on human/non-human relations that might be central for any activist researcher working on topics of justice (especially those that entangle and intersect human and other-than-human lives).

In this interview published in the WUR magazine, Rutgerd Boelens reflects on the key issues and ideas addressed by the Riverhood project. This project, developed in partnership with a large number of researchers, activists, local communities, has been awarded a five-year grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Boelens explains that he came across the ancient and nearly forgotten English term “riverhood” in an encyclopedia: “It turns out to be a nineteenth-century concept that means ‘the state of being a river’. That is what I want to investigate because I don’t see a river as just a lot of flowing water.”

Check out the full interview here.