River-as-Territory studies the contested technical-political processes of river commons co-governance initiatives and new water justice movements. River intervention designs include precise norms on how water should be distributed and controlled, how humans and nature must be ordered in technical scales and political hierarchies. Moral and symbolic orders legitimize this patterning, reinforcing the status quo. Importantly, in these plans, territories and hydraulic technology are “moralized”. They bear the designers’ class, gender, and cultural norms. River infrastructure performs as “hardened morality” or “materialized power” organizing inclusion and exclusion, enforcing particular organization and ethical behavior. This research line includes studying hydraulic infrastructure’s political norms and social morals, and investigates how people “re-moralize” their river territories and hydraulics, how they envision and produce territorial alternatives and counter-designs.

The main question within this dimension is:

How do different stakeholders imagine river systems as socionatural territorial complexes and materialize their wished-for ‘hydrosocial territories’?