Riverine Rights Conference, Oslo Metropolitan University, 27-30 August 2024, Oslo

From 27 to 30 August 2024, Oslo Metropolitan University and partner institutes organized the “Riverine Rights Conference” to discuss the findings of the Riverine Rights project. It presented its 4-years research on rivers in Colombia, New Zealand and India that were given legal personhood. Together with invited experts, the conferenced critically discussed the successes and challenges of this legal novelty, placing it in a broader context. ‘How and why were rivers given rights, and what are their implications?’ The organizers invited Riverhood and River Commons PI Rutgerd Boelens to give a keynote lecture and join their debate on policies, philosophies, concepts, strategies and findings.

The conference discussions centered around river degeneration in times environmental crises. ‘Does legal personhood offer ways of securing the wellbeing of rivers and communities living with them? Can legal personhood and rights of nature be useful elsewhere? Is it applicable to a Norwegian context?’.

Axel Borchgrevink presented the core ideas of the Riverine Rights research project and central notions regarding ‘River persons, rights and ontologies’. John Andrew McNeish joined with a conference on ‘The political ecology of river rights’, placing the Colombian river cases in a broader power perspective. Case presentations followed such as ‘Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River’ (Miriama Cribb), ‘The constitutional marasmus of the Atrato River’ (Catalina Vallejo), ‘Rights of rivers in India’ (Bibhu Prasad Nayak), ‘Religious environmentalism in India’ (Rahul Ranjan), ‘Legal rights for rivers as a watershed’ (Elizabeth Macpherson), ‘Rights of waters in Norway?’ (Malene Brandshaug), ‘Sami participation in Norway’s Tana River governance’ (Camilla Brattland) and a reflection on Sami indigenous struggles against extractivism, for environmental rights and territorial sovereignty, by Eva Maria Fjellheim (Arctic University of Norway).  Grant Wilson (Earth Law Centre) explained the central strategies of the Rights of Nature movement; Rachel Sieder (CIESAS, Mexico City) placed the Rights of Nature in a conceptual and political framework to understand its inherent legal pluralism politics;  Rutgerd Boelens presented core notions and strategies of Riverhood and River Commons (‘Riverhood: Rivers and social justice movements. Knowledge battles, subject-making and countermapping’); and Mihnea Tanasescu challenged nature’s legal personhood presenting a political-philosophical understanding of Modernity. Interventions from multiple conference’s participants followed, from Oslomet, the Rights, Power and Accountability Research Cluster at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and Norwegian and international academic, policy and civil society partners, engaging in lively and critical debates. See: www.oslomet.no/en/about/events/happens-rivers-legal-personhood.