The notion “riverhood” is a mid-19th century almost forgotten concept: “the state of being a river” (Oxford Dictionary). It expresses how different (formal and vernacular) cultures imagine, define, build and live with rivers as socionatural systems. Rivers as part of society, and vice versa. Rivers as an arena of (contested) co-production among humans and non-humans.
In the past decade, in the global South and North, a wide variety of new water justice movements (NWJM) have emerged. NWJMs are transdisciplinary, multi-actor and multi-scalar coalitions that challenge dominant river management approaches. They deploy a multitude of profoundly innovative strategies to restore or defend “living rivers”. A few examples are ecological flow clinics, the promotion of dam removals; federations designing new rules for shared catchment governance; citizens’ initiatives erecting river environmental health projects; and grassroots thinktanks. These NWJMs have the potential to revolutionize environmental debates, practices, laws and policies towards new, equitable and nature-rooted water governance. However, they are often excluded from policy and also academia has so far paid very little attention to them. Tools for understanding the emerging innovative river ontologies, normative frameworks, and commoning strategies are missing. Riverhood, thereto, aims to study, understand and support NWJMs, thereby contributing to more equitable, nature-entwined water governance.
Riverhood entwines new conceptual debates as Rights of Nature with frameworks that have been recently developed (e.g., on water justice and hydrosocial territories) to elaborate on new ones. In particular, rivers are theorized through four dimensions, and the new cross-scientific field of “riverhood” are being developed.
The project’s central question is: How do the new water justice movements shape and dynamize riverhood enlivening strategies, institutions and practices, and how can they potentiate radically new scientific and policy approaches for sustainable and equitable water governance?
OVERALL OBJECTIVE
Build innovative transdisciplinary concepts and methodological tools that enable analyzing and supporting the new water justice movements’ inventive institutions, strategies and practices of dynamizing “riverhood”, to contribute to radically new, equitable, nature-society rooted water governance. The project has four research lines, in accordance with the overall framework as explained under Concepts.
In order to investigate the central question of the project and pursue its objectives, PhD researchers together with local stakeholders work on eight cases studies in Europe (Netherlands and Spain) and Latin America (Ecuador and Colombia).
In the course of the project, Environmental Justice Labs (EJLs) are being employed. EJLs bring together riverine communities, artists, researchers, activists, and policy-makers to co-investigate and co-produce concepts, strategies and cross-cultural knowledge that express innovative practices, scientific insights, and creative policy potentials.
Project duration: 01 July 2021 to 30 June 2026 (60 months)
Project funding: Riverhood project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101002921).
photo by Laura Giraldo-Martinez
The Riverhood project includes eight cases studies in Europe (Netherlands and Spain) and Latin America (Ecuador and Colombia). Both in The Netherlands and in Spain, mega-hydraulic development to control water and society at once, have a long tradition. Both countries have deeply influenced mechanistic water control paradigms and river basin transformations in Latin America up to these days. However, the pendulum may now swing back, with a different society-nature approach. Ecuador’s new Constitution has adopted “Rights of Nature” as claimed for by its citizens, and in Colombia rivers have become subjects, not objects, of law and societal platforms. European new water justice movements (NWJM) ask for mutual learning with their Latin American forerunner peers’ concepts and experiences. Both aim to creatively translate these notions in new hybrid riverhood approaches, considering contextual similarities, differences and opportunities.
Browse the research projects below:
photo by Laura Giraldo-Martinez
The central activities of Riverhood include:
PhD Projects
Find more information on PhD Projects.
Environmental Justice Labs
The aim of the Environmental Justice Labs (EJLs) is to exchange experiences, create new ideas and concepts, and develop action proposals and site-specific interventions through learning-based partnerships between river communities, artists, researchers, activists, and policy-makers. This will be done through on-the-ground activities, local, national and international meetings, as well as through virtual tools and an international interactive platform. Besides developing EJLs in each case study site, interaction among EJLs will be also facilitated to enable a continuous cross-case and multi-scale engagement and learning.
Integration and dissemination
Integration and comparison of insights from the different case studies, as well as dissemination of findings through scientific articles, movies, policy papers, this website and others, are constantly being done by the project staff and postdoc researchers throughout the project. You can find all outputs under the tab publications.
photo by Laura Giraldo-Martinez
ABSTRACT: Counter-maps have become an increasingly important practice for social movements to claim their rights and to articulate emancipatory actions against extractive intervention plans and dominant territorial reconfiguration projects, especially in the contested field of water governance. Yet the emancipatory nature of these counter-maps should not be taken for granted: much depends on the way in which power relations and different knowledges are negotiated in the critical process of map-making. In this article we therefore investigate how counter cartography, and in particular counter-mapping processes by water justice movements, may benefit from insights from the field and praxis of critical pedagogy. We argue that there is great potential to be unlocked in exploring critical cartography from that perspective. Rather than dissecting the outcomes produced by a critical cartographic practice, we turn our attention to unveiling the transformative and actionable potential that can be found in the mapping process itself. We explore this topic within the context of the grassroots movements that have water as one of their central issues given its relevance and potential for the promotion of more just and sustainable river practices. To this end, we analyse two social arenas in Ecuador where local collectives are engaged in river struggles: the Amazonian Napo province and the Andean district of Licto, Chimborazo province.
ABSTRACT: This paper develops the methodological concept of river co-learning arenas (RCAs) and explores their potential to strengthen innovative grassroots river initiatives, enliven river commons, regenerate river ecologies, and foster greater socio-ecological justice. The integrity of river systems has been threatened in profound ways over the last century. Pollution, damming, canalisation, and water grabbing are some examples of pressures threatening the entwined lifeworlds of human and non-human communities that depend on riverine systems. Finding ways to reverse the trends of environmental degradation demands complex spatial–temporal, political, and institutional articulations across different levels of governance (from local to global) and among a plurality of actors who operate from diverse spheres of knowledge and systems of practice, and who have distinct capacities to affect decision-making. In this context, grassroots river initiatives worldwide use new multi-actor and multi-level dialogue arenas to develop proposals for river regeneration and promote social-ecological justice in opposition to dominant technocratic-hydraulic development strategies. This paper conceptualises these spaces of dialogue and action as RCAs and critically reflects on ways of organising and supporting RCAs while facilitating their cross-fertilisation in transdisciplinary practice. By integrating studies, debates, and theories from diverse disciplines, we generate multi-faceted insights and present cornerstones for the engagement with and/or enaction of RCAs. This encompasses five main themes central to RCAs: (1) River knowledge encounters and truth regimes, (2) transgressive co-learning, (3) confrontation and collaboration dynamics, (4) ongoing reflexivity, (5) transcultural knowledge assemblages and translocal bridging of rooted knowledge.
ABSTRACT: In response to capitalist territorial transformations, humans’ predatory subjection of nature, and worldwide socio-environmental injustices, a diverse set of eco-centric, other-than-human, and indigenous worldview-inspired perspectives have emerged in water debates and practices. Rights of Nature (RoN) and Rights of Rivers (RoR) approaches are examples of this. But while these ‘river ontological turns’ hold exciting conceptual and political potential, they also invite critical reflection. Proponents often advance these new ontological perspectives and initiatives as being more ‘real’ and ‘natural’ than what came before. We challenge this notion by conceptualising such perspectives, similar to all ontological framings, as politically contested entrances to imagining and ordering the real. We argue that these new and alternative ontological understandings of the world – and their related initiatives – are politically produced, culturally enacted, and strategically mobilised. In effect, they contribute to the constitution (or contestation) of particular power relations. Focusing specifically on river debates, we identify and explore the following fields of contention that arise in and from alternative eco-centric and non-human ontological turns: the god-trick; naturalisation; de-centring the human; mystifying/essentialising indigeneity; and subjectification-through-recognition. By discussing these fields of contention, we call for a re-politicisation of the recent river (and other related) ontological turns, their underlying assumptions, and conceptual-political tendencies. Such critical scrutiny can contribute to enriching local/global struggles for riverine environmental justice.
ABSTRACT: Esta ‘reflexión final’ ha sido elaborada basado en las presentaciones y debates en las plenarias y sesiones del evento “Ríos en Movimiento que se realizó en Manizales entre el 11 y 15 Marzo de 2024 y fue organizado por los proyectos Riverhood y River Commons de la Universidad de Wageningen en alianza con: Alianza Justicia Hídrica, Universidad de Caldas, Corporación Nodo, Natural Seeds Alliance, Movimiento Socioambiental Kumanday, Tejido de Colectivos Unitierra Manizales y Suroccidente Colombiano, Tejinando Sentipensares (Tejido de pluriversidades de a pie), CENSAT Agua Viva, y Asociación Broederlijk Delen.
ABSTRACT: Rivers have attracted increasing attention as politically contested entities. Existing literature on hydrosocial territories sheds light on how power relations and cultural-political hierarchies permeate rivers and their processes of territorialization, management, and governance. Yet, so far, the multispecies dimension of and in these processes remains under-addressed. This article helps fill in this gap by weaving together two central concepts: hydrosocial territories and multispecies justice. In this theoretical exploration we engage with rivers as living entities and territories co-created, co-inhabited, and actively reshaped by a diversity of human and other-than-human beings. We argue that acknowledging the latter’s agency, as well as the multiple ways in which power and politics constantly cross species boundaries in riverine territories, calls for a dialogue with the notion of multispecies justice (MSJ). We pose that MSJ can support, strengthen, and challenge movements, practices, and modes of relationship around the defence, conservation, and restoration of rivers.
ABSTRACT: Rivers Since the 1980s, scholars have been documenting protest movements against the building of large hydropower dams. These movements have arisen mainly in communities where people have experienced displacement and loss of livelihood without receiving proper compensation. Less attention has been paid to community action and environmental movements that promoted the restoration of canalised, diverted, depleted and/or polluted rivers. Since the beginning of the 2000s, however, more attention is being paid in academic literature to communities and social movements that propose to remove dams, stop pollution of rivers, restore fish ecosystems, or rewild rivers. There has also been increased interest in movements advocating for the granting of legal personhood to rivers and in those that are opposing dams because they want to protect free-flowing rivers for fish migration or tourism. A systematic literature review was undertaken in order to analyse scientific publications on diverse river defence and restoration movements. A relatively small number (104) of publications was retrieved, but these nevertheless showed a diversity in geographic spread and coverage of river issues and river movement strategies. The attention of the publications shifted from anti-dam protests to a variety of issues including especially river pollution, and to a minor degree issues like indigenous rights and rights of rivers. Most of the publications addressed river movements in the USA and India and the majority did not describe the movements’ activities in detail; several, however, described effective activism, advocacy, citizen science monitoring, and litigation. The review suggests that river movements contribute to democratic governance and environmental justice. It also shows that the scientific literature is focused mainly on large anti-dam protests and pays less attention to local river activism and its networks.
ABSTRACT: In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. River futures influence the way adaptation projects are implemented in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, thereby sidelining and delegitimising alternative river futures. So far, limited work has been performed on the power of river futures in the context of climate change adaptation. We conceptualised the power of river futures through river imaginaries, i.e., collectively performed and publicly envisioned reproductions of riverine socionatures mobilised through truth claims of social life and order. Using the Border Meuse project as a case study, a climate change adaptation project in a stretch of the river Meuse in the south of the Netherlands, and a proclaimed success story of climate adaptation in Dutch water management, we elucidated how three river imaginaries (a modern river imaginary, a market-driven imaginary, and an eco-centric river imaginary) merged into an eco-modern river imaginary. Importantly, not only did the river futures merge, but their aligned truth regimes also merged. Thus, we argue that George Orwell’s famous quote, “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” can be extended to “who controls the future, controls how we see and act in the present, and how we rediscover the past”.
ABSTRACT: Around the world, the development of large dams has been increasingly contested. India is no exception and has seen the mobilisation of powerful domestic and transnational socio-environmental movements against dams over more than four decades. In this context, the State of Sikkim in northeast India has been entangled in prolonged hydropower development conflicts since the late 1990s. This article analyses these conflictive entanglements between the Government of India, the State Government of Sikkim, power companies and Sikkim’s autochthonous tribe, the Lepchas. It zooms in on the period of 2011–2017, which saw an abrupt escalation of the conflicts to analyse the messy, deeply political and often unpredictable and contradictory world of dam construction and its contestations. Our analysis is informed by the power cube framework developed by John Gaventa. Our analysis shows how hydropower development is deeply intertwined with local patronage relationships. We show how local elections bring out dam conflict and the operation of power into the open, sometimes leading to abrupt and unexpected switches in positions in relation to hydropower development. We show that these switches should be seen not only as “strategic electoral tactics” but also and importantly as contentious political struggles that (re)configure power in the region. We show how in this process, powerful political actors continuously seek to stabilise power relations among the governing and the governed, choreographing a specific socio-hydraulic order that stretches way beyond simple pro- and anti-dam actors and coalitions as it is embedded in deep hydro(-electro) politics and power plays.
ABSTRACT: To advance actionable knowledge production in the context of water struggles, this article identifies ways to strengthen transformative learning processes within riverine social movements. The complex challenges associated with water struggles point to an increasing need to explore ways in which these processes can be shaped and to promote changes in the worldviews that inform how water and riverine environments are perceived and structured. This study draws on the grassroots movement for the social-ecological regeneration of the Taquara Stream in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Research on this case has shown that the actions conducted by this movement fostered learning processes through the creation of innovative forms of involvement that brought together multiple actors. A panel of experts conducted an in-depth analysis of the learning practices observed in this case. This article discusses five aspects of the learning process, which have been identified by the experts, that are essential to expanding the transformative potential of water-related social movements: (1) building relationships of trust between actors, (2) building links with and between key actors in the process, (3) creating dialogue spaces that promote the co-creation of actionable knowledge, (4) engaging actors spontaneously, proactively, and co-responsibly in the process, and (5) bringing participatory research into local processes.
ABSTRACT: This article explores how irrigation farmer (regante) subjectivities are constructed in direct conjunction with the production of modernist–capitalist hydrosocial territories across the Tagus and Segura river basins in central and south-east Spain. We explore the complexities and contradictions of how, at various scales of governance, authorities establish and seek to realize ideal regante subjects across time and space. We mobilize a hydrosocial territory approach, combined with feminist political ecology and hegemony literature, to explore how such ideal subjects are built through Spanish and regional legislation and policies from 1866 to 2023. Through interviews with regantes in six irrigation communities, we identify different ideal and actual regante subjects in territories interconnected by the Tagus–Segura Aqueduct. We analyze how policy shifts lead to multiple and contradictory roles and responsibilities for regante subjects, which are linked to plot modernization, agricultural professionalization, and farmer rejuvenation. These sharpen divisions between smallholders and emerging large capitalist actors. Counterhegemonic territorial proposals resist these pressures by embodying alternative values and imaginaries. We conclude that through such counterhegemonic struggles, subject construction is enriched, identifying real-life existing and future alternatives for more just hydrosocial territories.
ABSTRACT: Megadams are controversial ventures. Despite their contentious benefits, the negative impacts on local communities are enormous. This has prompted substantial disapproval and resistance, particularly from the communities that endure the most of its adverse effects. While many megadams have been constructed in the face of opposition, others have been halted or altered as a result of the fierce protests of affected people and their allies. A better understanding of the latter is key to promoting equitable and just water governance throughout the implementation of hydraulic infrastructure. Based on ethnographic and historical research carried out between 2014 and 2017, the article shows the power relations, social actors and historical-contextual factors that have influenced the development of the Daule-Peripa and Baba megadams on the Ecuadorian coast. From a political ecology and subaltern studies perspective, this article describes and analyses the social, territorial, and historical interconnectedness of the local communities of Patricia Pilar and Daule-Peripa dam in coastal Ecuador that successfully stopped the construction of a dam and had a great influence on its final hydraulic design. I argue that, given the adequate socio-political conditions and a systematic process of knowledge and experience exchange among affected communities, anti-dam struggles can emerge with significant capacity to influence in their favour the megadam implementation processes and other hydraulic infrastructures.
ABSTRACT: This paper examines how utopian river planning has arisen in Colombia and Spain since the late nineteenth century. Specifically, the paper contributes to understanding how particular ideologies of modernism and development present in territorial planning connect both countries. Taking Thomas More’s classic work ‘Utopia’ as the analytical reference, I analyze how utopian tendencies have traveled through time and space to shape territorial planning and water governance. In both countries, this was evident in the late nineteenth century through the political project to strengthen the nation state. For Spain, I describe the regenerationist movement and the hydraulic utopia led by the Spanish intellectual Joaquín Costa, who forged the dream of a water nationhood. By contrast, in Colombia, several political intellectuals looked at Europe and North America as a source of inspiration to achieve progress by controlling rivers. Through the method of disjunctive comparison, I show how the same utopian notions are expressed in similar ways in distinct contexts: violently governing the flows of rivers, standardizing minds and ordering territories towards capital growth. This paper contributes to grasping the notions and roots of the discourses that have colonized the political water agendas in both countries.
ABSTRACT: Preserving cultural heritage and achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of protecting life below water do not always go hand in hand. The case of the Serpis River sheds light on the political, cultural and legal tensions that may arise when pursuing these two policy goals. To better understand these tensions, we propose acknowledging that rivers are complex natural-cultural systems imagined and shaped through various actors’ values, interests, practices and infrastructures (Boelens et al. 2016). River restoration initiatives generate divisions between actors and institutions with different ways of defining and valuing natural and cultural heritage.
ABSTRACT: Efforts to shape more sustainable and just land and water management practices are increasingly turning to the past for inspiration. However, what the past looked like exactly and what can be learned from it and applied to present-day challenges is not straightforward. Peru is one of those places where reviving ancestral land and water management practices and knowledge has become popular. This article starts with a project that aimed to recuperate ancestral water infiltration structures in the Peruvian highlands. Drawing on interviews conducted shortly after the project’s implementation, the author analyses how history and “the past” are imagined differently by various actors, according to their current worldviews, interests and values. The author unpacks the consequences of these diverse pasts for present-day relations and project implementation, calling attention to the importance of making explicit the “politics of the past,” including how the past is portrayed and by whom, and which past is to be recuperated or revalorized.
ABSTRACT: Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to bring nuance to such framings by analyzing broader and diverse river-commoning initiatives and the state–citizens relations that underlie them. To study these relations we build on notions of communality, grassroots scalar politics, rooted water collectives, and water justice movements, which we use to analyze several collective practices, initiatives, and movements that aim to protect rivers in Thailand, Spain, Ecuador, and Mozambique. The analysis of these cases shows the myriad ways in which river collectives engage with different manifestations of the state at multiple scales. As we show, while some collectives strategically remain unnoticed, others actively seek and create diverse spaces of engagement with like-minded citizen initiatives, supportive non-governmental organizations, and state actors. Through these relations, alliances are made and political space is sought to advance river commoning initiatives. This leads to a variety of context-specific multi-scalar state–citizens relations and river commoning processes in water governance arenas.
ABSTRACT: In this opinion piece, we argue for the need to acknowledge, study, and engage with New Water Justice Movements around the world. What we term NWJMs is in fact a colourful assembly of grassroots groups and initiatives, as well as regional networks and nongovernmental alliances, that mobilize to protect or revive rivers, and to challenge dominant ways of understanding, ordering and exploiting rivers and riverine inhabitants. Whereas previous water justice initiatives have mainly focused on issues of fair distribution (of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’) and representation for human groups, the more recently emerging movements also explicitly include nonhuman concerns and intertwine distribution and representation with related struggles for cultural justice and socio-ecological, intergenerational integrity.
ABSTRACT: In this article we introduce the notion of imaginaries as a conceptual entry to study and better understand how and why commons re-create and transform. We do so by first exploring imaginaries as assemblages, and second by analytically dividing imaginaries in dominant and alternative imaginaries. While the former refer to how people imagine and live their social existence around built expectations and their underlying notions, the latter refers to imaginaries that critique instituted society and through it create ‘germs’ that can lead to transformation. Through this lens we analyze contestations that have emerged around the introduction of drip irrigation in two irrigation communities in the Valencia Region of Spain. These two case studies (Carcaixent and Potries) show how, among the commons, alternative imaginaries are challenging the dominant imaginaries of drip irrigation. We show how these alternative imaginaries result from a different way of assembling irrigation and the social, cultural, material, and economic relations around it. These insights, we argue, open up avenues that allow us to better understand the imaginary creations that reproduce a specific existing order, as well as the germ(s) that can lead to transformations and change.
ABSTRACT:Rivers are ecosystems indispensable for the survival of both humans and non-human species. Yet humans often disregard their importance and modify the existing socio-natural equilibrium of rivers in the pursuit of economic and political agendas. With a focus on new water justice movements, this article advocates a perspective that recognizes rivers as hydrosocial territories, actively and continuously co-created, co-inhabited, and transformed by a multiplicity of human and other-thanhuman beings. Such a perspective opens a path to a multispecies justice framework that involves rethinking the relations between human and non-human beings in the worlds we share as a medium for creating more socio-ecologically just and biodiverse water worlds.
River trout (Source: Hunter Brumels via Unsplash)
Boelens, R., A. Escobar, K. Bakker, L. Hommes, E. Swyngedouw, B. Hogenboom, E.H. Huijbens, S. Jackson, J. Vos, L.M. Harris, K.J. Joy, F. de Castro, B. Duarte-Abadía, D. Tubino de Souza, H. Lotz-Sisitka, N. Hernández-Mora, J. Martínez-Alier, D. Roca-Servat, T. Perreault, C. Sanchis-Ibor, D. Suhardiman, A. Ulloa, A. Wals, J. Hoogesteger, J.P. Hidalgo-Bastidas, T. Roa-Avendaño, G.J. Veldwisch, P. Woodhouse & K.M. Wantzen (2023). Riverhood: Political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(3), 1125–1156. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120810
ABSTRACT: Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper’s framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.
Riverhood ontological framework for research and action (authors’ own elaboration). NWJMs: new water justice movements.
ABSTRACT: An appreciation of the diversity of world water cultures – past and present – is essential to recognizing the conflicts and solutions that exist within water management. This article analyzes the intricacies of water governance and politics. It argues for new ways to recognize and negotiate the value of local water cultures, and proposes the term “Riverhood” as a way to understand the political, technological and cultural arenas in which water rights and governance frameworks are being shaped in grassroots movements’ everyday practice, in interaction with rivers’ adjacent social and ecological communities (www.movingrivers.org).
Lena Hommes (2022). The Ageing of Infrastructure and Ideologies: Contestations Around Dam Removal in Spain. Water Alternatives 15(3): 592-613
ABSTRACT: This paper analyses the discussions surrounding dam removal in Spain and, specifically, ongoing contestations around the Toranes Dam. Engaging with scholarship about the temporalities of infrastructure and imaginaries, I show how dam removal is a trend that comes forth from temporally situated and shifting relations in the sociopolitical, technical, financial and environmental networks in which dams are embedded. More than simply a consequence of material decay and expiring use licences, dam removal is also intrinsically related to changing imaginaries about dams, rivers and nature. However, dam removal is contested. Central to it are debates about the definition of, and relations between, nature, society and cultural heritage in the past, present and future. People’s subjectivities – shaped by the dam and its intended and unintended effects on the environment and hydrosocial relations – are also a source of anti-removal mobilisation. The paper demonstrates how dam removal is a fascinating topic that draws attention to the different temporalities dams hold, including the stage of material and potentially also ideological ruin. Dam removal, however, does not (yet?) represent a clear paradigm shift; rather, the reality is messy, with dam construction and removal at times being promoted simultaneously.Download here the photo report.
PHOTO REPORT – Secondment: The Meuse River – Research and practice, living the fieldwork (2022)
The Secondment was a 2-month course designed to provide Riverhood and River Commons PhD students with action-research tools and experiences in preparation for their actual fieldwork in various countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In this course, the PhDs developed a short-term action-action project in partnership with local initiatives and institutional actors working on the Meuse River, in the Netherlands. Three excursions, to different locations along the Meuse River, were organized as part of the groups’ assignments. The first excursion was to Limburg; the second, was to Brabant; and the last trip was to Biesbosch. Download here the photo report.
The Seminar Rivers, Commons, Movements took place in Valencia, Spain, and gathered scholars and PhD researchers who focus on theoretical and methodological concepts, strategies and experiences related to studying and supporting evolving ‘river commons’ and new water justice movements (NWJMs), to revitalise rivers. The seminar’s case presentations and research frames and proposals engaged with conceptualizing river systems in all senses, and understanding and supporting river knowledge co-creation and democratisation from the bottom up. Click here to download the Seminar Rivers, Commons, Movements Report.
World’s rivers are fundamental to social and natural well-being but profoundly affected by mega-damming and pollution. In response to top-down and technocratic approaches, in many places, riverine communities practice forms of ‘river co-governance’, integrating ecological, cultural, political, economic and technological dimensions. In addition, new water justice movements (NWJMs) have emerged worldwide to creatively transform local ideas for ‘enlivening rivers’ into global action and vice versa. The Summer School aimed to provide PhD students who conduct research on these ‘river commons’ and NWJMs with transdisciplinary concepts and approaches for studying their emerging ideas, concepts, proposals and strategies. The different sessions thereby focused on conceptualizing river systems in all senses, and capacity-building for (understanding and supporting) river knowledge co-creation and democratisation from the bottom up. Click here to download the Summer School Report.
ABSTRACT: Utopians organized space, nature and society to perfection, including land and water governance – rescuing society from deep-rooted crisis: “The happiest basis for a civilized community, to be universally adopted” (Thomas More, 1516). These days, similarly, well-intended utopian water governance regimes suggest radical transformations to combat the global Water Crisis, controlling deviant natures and humans. In this essay I examine water utopia and dystopia as mirror societies. Modern utopias ignore real-life water cultures, squeeze rivers dry, concentrate water for the few, and blame the victims. But water-user collectives, men and women, increasingly speak up. They ask scholars and students to help question Flying Islands experts’ claims to rationality, democracy and equity; to co-create water ontologies and epistemologies, and co-design water governance, building rooted socionatural commons, building “riverhood”.
ABSTRACT: Infrastructures and their roles and connections to and in territories and territorialization processes have increasingly become objects of study in political geography scholarship. In this contribution, we build on these emerging insights and advance them by further conceptually disentangling the agential role of infrastructure. We bring together the notions of territory, governmentality, imaginaries and subjectivities, to clarify how exactly hydraulic infrastructure acts to transform relations between space, people and materiality. We start by introducing territorialization as a process of ‘ordering things’ in a certain space and time through different techniques of government. We then show how, at the base of such territorialization processes, are imaginaries that contain normative ideas about how space and socio-territorial relations should be ordered. Imaginaries are consequently materialized through hydraulic infrastructure through the inscription of morals, values and norms in infrastructure design, construction and operation. This set of materialities and relations embedded in infrastructure brings changes to the existing relations between space, water and people. In particular, we highlight the repercussions of infrastructure for how people understand and relate to each other, the environment, water, technology and space: in other words, how subjectivities change as an effect of hydraulic infrastructure constitution. Last, we show how infrastructure and the related hydrosocial territories that develop around it are a dynamic arena of contestation and transformation. We argue that socio-material fractures, emerging counter-imaginaries and the disruptive capacities of subjectivities constantly challenge the ‘fixes’ that infrastructures aim to inscribe in hydrosocial territories. Throughout the paper, we use empirical examples from recent research on hydraulic infrastructure and territorial transformations to ground the conceptual ideas.
Conceptual illustration of how infrastructure fixes specific imaginaries and shapes emerging hydrosocial configurations.
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes how smallholders of Subtanjalla, in coastal Peru, conceive irrigation water as a central element and carrier of hydrosocial relations and territories. We base our analysis on an exploration of the local notions of agua nueva and yocle. These two notions bind together time, space, nature and culture into specific understandings of territorial connections and reciprocities. Through these understandings water is much more than H2O. Instead of just representing an economic good or a material input for irrigated agriculture water is seen as a binding element that bridges and brings together the Andean world with that of Subtanjalla in the Peruvian coast. Water is, from this perspective, a lively and always in-the-making composition of humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans in which there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, past and present, object and subject. We argue that water as an assemblage opens up now lines of inquiry into hydrosocial territories and relations across time and space through the departure of a fundamentally relational understandings of water, its use and governance.
Artists impression of the assemblages that compose agua nueva and yocle in a specific hydrosocial territory (drawn by Maarten Loopmans).
This book builds a comparative and analytical narrative with a historical basis on the modernist utopian thought that shapes hydroterritorial planning policies in Colombia and Spain. At the same time, it highlights contemporary dystopias and analyses the role of social movements in protecting their rights and reviving the flow of rivers and their territories. The book is the result of Bibiana’s Ph.D. research. It’s available at Ríos, utopías y movimientos sociales – Editorial Abya Yala
ABSTRACT: The Magdalena River, Colombia’s main river backbone, features multiple tensions and socio-environmental conflicts. They manifest themselves in the river’s ecological degradation and negatively impact the riparian communities and artisanal fishermen, whose productive activities and rights of access to water are restricted. For these communities, the river is a means of passing down and exchanging knowledge between generations. However, their knowledge and practices are not recognized in the dominant governance processes over the Magdalena River. In an interview with Juan Carlos Gutiérrez-Camargo, environmental activist, researcher and companion of artisanal fishermen, we illustrate the universe of epistemologies and worldviews of these communities. We discuss, from a legal-pluralism perspective, the contradictions between state norms and authorities, parastatal powers, and the customary rights of fishing communities. We analyze how the simultaneous presence of various authorities and the complex, unequal arena of legal, extra-legal and illegal forces, hinders enforcement of fishermen’s customary socio-legal repertoires and also of the Colombian Constitution to protect riverside communities’ human rights. The interview reflects on the great complexity of exercising community leadership, environmental protection and defense of artisanal fishing in the midst of a socio-normative political arena permeated by state abandonment and paramilitary violence. For this reason, the interview stresses the importance of recognizing artisanal fisher collectives as political subjects in river co-governance. It also highlights the ambivalent implications of granting rights to nature and rivers: their meaning, functions and impact depend on their political trajectory and mobilization by grassrooted collectives. Finally, Gutiérrez proposes strengthening knowledge networks to bolster river co-governance where the political-cultural and socio-normative frameworks of riverside communities play a preponderant role.
ABSTRACT: This chapter uses a political ecology approach to examine how large dams and megahydraulic infrastructure in many parts of the world dispossess smallholder families and communities of their water and water rights, transforming and disintegrating territories environmentally and socially. It deploys the notion of ‘hydraulic property creation’ to look at the relationships among hydraulic infrastructure development and changing water rights frameworks. It contrasts mega-hydraulic projects that separate designer-builder and user worlds, and user-developed hydraulic systems. It presents important points of attention for more people- and nature-inclusive water governance and hydraulic intervention projects that build on social and environmental justice.
photo by Laura Giraldo-Martinez