Tagus-Segura interbasin transfer, Spain

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In its inauguration in 1979, the Tagus-Segura Interbasin Transfer was designed to transfer up to 650 hm3/year of water from the head of the Tagus river along 286 km of canals, pipes, and the Jucar river, to the Segura river basin. From there it is distributed for human consumption and to a large swathe of irrigated territory across the region of Murcia and the provinces of Alicante (Valencian Community) and Almeria (Andalusia). It is the subject of intense contestations across geographies, territories, and political scales, with economic groups and political movements on either side claiming the Tagus headwaters as their basin’s own. Environmental movements increasingly claim the need for larger quantities of minimum environmental flows, water-related ecological issues are increasing in size and scope in both basins, and low rainfall has decreased the amount of Tagus headwaters transferred, instigating contestations further. In this context, this research collaborates with irrigation associations in both the Tagus and Segura basins, where it aims to understand irrigators’ perceptions of their territory, what the local problems related to water and agriculture are, how the transfer has impacted them, and what their perceptions of other irrigator associations in different territories and basins are. Similarly, this research explores their hopes and doubts for the water future of their territories, their perceptions of sustainability, and how this sustainability is perceived in their territories and across their own and other basins.

PhD researcher: Nick Bourguignon

Actual and projected water scarcity has accelerated the development, both in number and in scale, of hydrological infrastructure, particularly of mega-projects in the form of Inter-Basin Water Transfers (IBWTs). These are unique since IBWTs transfer freshwater from one geographically distinct river catchment or basin to another. In the most ambitious cases, planned IBWTs would make up multi-IBWT hydro-networks. Despite increased implementation of demand-side policies with the IWRM water governance paradigm shift, supply-side options in the form of IBWTs are going to increase. IBWTs are a powerful empirical case to deploy and examine hydrosocial territories, since they shift and change socionatural relations across scales, temporalities, and territories, (re)casting the relationships between individuals, society, the State, and nature, as well as with and beyond water. Using IBWTs as the empirical case, this research sits at the intersection of the political ecology of water, socionatural relations, science and technology studies, subjectivities, and feminist futures scholarship. It argues that IBWTs craft new and contradictory hydrosocial relations, inserting specific territories, populations, and ecologies into intensifying processes of globalization and accumulation, and others into hinterlands, along specific sociopolitical narratives that fashion hegemonic, counterhegemonic, ambiguous, and contested socionatural subjects and territories. Using a mixed methods approach, this research analyzes IBWTs both from above – reviewing the literature on IBWTs from across the world to provide broad perspectives, and from below – taking the Tajo-Segura IBWT in Spain and irrigation farmers on either side of the transfer – to explore this argument.

La Miel River, Colombia

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La Miel, a river that originates in the municipality of Marulanda in the Central Andes and debouches into the Magdalena River, has been intervened by a large dam (Miel I) and a run-of-the-river hydroelectric (El Edén). These projects have had considerable impacts on the sources of water in the area, impacting the livelihoods of riverine and peasant communities. Since the year 2021, peasant and fisher communities, environmental movements, and academics have created the “Alianza Abrazo Río La Miel” for the defense of water, life, and territory. They oppose the construction of the hydroelectric project “Miel II” with arguments such as: “rivers for life and not for death”, “La Miel river is to drink not to sell”, and “Our river is not for sale” (Alianza Abrazo Río La Miel, 2022).

PhD researcher: Ana María Trujillo

Worldwide, rivers face significant environmental challenges growing in frequency and severity: increased urbanization, industrial pollution,  hydroelectricity demands, and climate change are some factors that put rivers under pressure. Despite the implicit political character of such challenges, mainstream water governance tends to approach them as “natural problems affecting all of us” and propose technical solutions to solve them. Such focus leads to a lack of understanding of the political, justice, and democratic dimensions of river governance.

Aiming to address this gap, this research builds on concepts from political ecology and critical legal studies to understand divergent everyday experiences of environmental injustice and the pluri-legal mobilization strategies that riverine communities use to challenge them. The case studies of “La Miel” (Colombia) and “Serpis” (Spain) rivers will nurture the empirical basis of this work. To understand the particularities of both contexts, this research will use River Co-learning Arenas (RCAs) as the primary research method, which may include river walks, environmental justice workshops, in-depth interviews, and video exchanges. This research aims to contribute to conceptual thinking about environmental justice beyond universalism and to better understand the role of pluri-legal mobilization and global exchange of ideas in advancing river defense and environmental justice.

Meuse River, The Netherlands

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The river Meuse is a transboundary river with multiple forms of human infrastructure (e.g. dams and weirs) along its course on Dutch territory, and that has been historically highly polluted by industry. Recent campaigns and initiatives have been developed to try to restore its natural landscape and river health. Overall, this case gathers different aspects of human/non-human relations and of nature-society entanglements that make it an interesting study site for a research project on multispecies justice, including: nature restoration or nature “development” projects such as the Grensmaas/Border Meuse project or the Biesbosch protected wetland; how human infrastructure such as the impressive Haringvlietdam impacts fish migration and other features of everyday non-human life and the human cultural practices associated with these; a recent campaign to recognise rights to the river Meuse (“Maak de Maas de Baas”); among others.

PhD researcher: Carlota Houart

Water is crucial for life on Earth, but many of the world’s rivers are under threat from human activities and infrastructure such as dams, mining and pollution, and diversion or depletion. These forms of controlling and transforming rivers are responsible not only for the impoverishment and disempowerment of riverine human communities across the globe; but also for the endangerment and disappearance of global populations of freshwater species and of diverse animal and plant communities who live in, with, and around rivers. In such context, this research will explore the theoretical and on-the-ground implications of conceptualizing and understanding rivers and their socio-environments through the lens of multispecies justice. Multispecies justice is an emergent research program that views a diversity of humans and other-than-human beings as subjects of justice; and that seeks to reflect on how to transform our relations with other beings in accordance with this.

From a political ecology perspective, this research will analyse how both human and non-human beings co-inhabit, co-create, and co-shape river systems. This will involve critically looking into how their agency and participation in rivers might be acknowledged, represented, and/or included in grassroots initiatives; and what consequences this may have in terms of political relations and processes. By doing multispecies ethnography in the Piatúa River in Ecuador and the Meuse River in the Netherlands, this investigation will focus on the following question: “How can the notion of multispecies justice help to conceptualise and support socio-environmental river defense and restoration practices in the biodiverse hydrosocial territories of the Piatúa and the Maas Rivers, and what are the main challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of applying this notion across scales, cultures, and contexts?”.

De Berkel River, The Netherlands

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The Berkel is a fluvial river that starts in Germany and it meanders towards the Netherlands through the Achterhoek region reaching the city of Zutphen, where it flows into the IJssel (van Onzenoort, 2016). Originally, the river had seasonally overflowed floodplains that constantly changed its meanders (Otermann, 2015). This flooding uncertainty led humans to control the Berkel since the 13th century with canalization works to prevent floods and facilitate navigation (Logemann, 2021; van Onzenoort, 2016). One of the first large-scale landscape transformations was the division of the markegronden (common land) from 1886 where large areas were drained to be parcelled and cultivated (Otermann, 2015). In the 20th century, the Berkel started to be rationally drained through canalizations, weirs, and sluices transforming its landscape with intensified agriculture, land reclamation, and consolidation by provincial and national government initiatives such as the ‘ruilverkaveling’ (Waterschap-Rijn-en-IJssel, 2017).

Nowadays, water management in the Netherlands has new ecological, cultural, and social goals where different actors are working on restoration projects to bring back the meandering condition of the Berkel to enhance its natural-cultural history (Logemann, 2021). The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, Rijn en Ijssel Waterboard, Municipalities, land owners, and citizen-private organizations (e.g. Geldersh Landschap en Kasteelen or “the 3rd Berkel Company”) have been active stakeholders in these territorial transformations, leading to a constant process of negotiation regarding the landscape management of the Berkel (Frijhooff et al., 2011). During the research, it will be central to understand how these scales of jurisdiction and their related legal, financial, and political power have historically informed and shaped the transformation of the landscape.

REFERENCES:

Frijhooff, W., Groothedde, M., Strake, C. t., & Loohuis, J. (2011). Historische atlas van Zutphen : torenstad aan Berkel en IJssel. Vantilt.

Logemann, D. (2021). Achtergronden: over de Berkel. Retrieved 2022/06/08 from https://www.berkelpad.nl/achtergronden/over-de-berkel/

Otermann, K. (2015). De Berkel op de schop. Natura, (4), 16-17.

van Onzenoort, K. (2016). Beleef de Berkel. Mooi Gelderland, 13(4), 14-15.

Waterschap-Rijn-en-IJssel. (2017). Berkel en Zijtakken. Retrieved 2022/06/08 from https://www.wrij.nl/statisch/berkel/kopie-watersysteem-0/buurserbeek/

PhD researcher: Catalina Rey Hernández

Worldwide, the management of rivers and riverine landscapes has been based on technocratic expert knowledge, involving top-down processes of landscape design, territorial planning, and related social-material transformations. These processes directly affect riverine communities and livelihoods, triggering local confrontations with -and adaptations to- the imposed designs and related forms of socio-material ordering. In this context, this research aims to better understand: a) how such riverine landscape design and territorial ordering plans are shaped and re-created by policies, institutional and normative practices, and specific powerful interest groups; b) how such designs transform socio-material relations and practices in local riverine communities; c) how communities resist, negotiate and transform the imposition of such designs and territorial ordering plans; and d) in which ways counter designs and counter geographies can support resistance groups and networks to express their own riverine understandings, aspirations and interests. The research will focus on the cases of the re-design of the Berkel River (NL) and the contestations around large-scale mining projects in the Quimsacocha wetlands (EC). The research will build on insights from the social construction of technology scholarship and notions of actor-network theory to better understand and theorize the role of ‘designs’ in the contestation and transformation of riverine spaces in which a multiplicity of actors try to create a specific social, technological and environmental order (a hydrosocial territory).

Piatúa River, Ecuador

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The Piatúa River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in Ecuador to have so far escaped contamination from mining, pollution, and other forms of negative human interference. It forms a precious ecological corridor across the Amazon rainforest and has been home to both human and other-than-human communities for millennia. Since 2014, however, an Ecuadorian energy company has been trying to build a hydro dam in the area, which would capture more than 70% of the river’s water flow and significantly impact its biodiversity. It also represents a threat against the cultural and historical rights of local Kichwa communities, one of the reasons why they have been actively mobilising against this hydropower development plan. Local communities and environmental organisations have therefore been trying to protect the Piatúa and its local inhabitants (human and non-human), namely by appealing to the rights of the river and of its peoples.

PhD researcher: Carlota Houart

Water is crucial for life on Earth, but many of the world’s rivers are under threat from human activities and infrastructure such as dams, mining and pollution, and diversion or depletion. These forms of controlling and transforming rivers are responsible not only for the impoverishment and disempowerment of riverine human communities across the globe; but also for the endangerment and disappearance of global populations of freshwater species and of diverse animal and plant communities who live in, with, and around rivers. In such context, I will explore the theoretical and on-the-ground implications of conceptualizing and understanding rivers and their socio-environments through the lens of multispecies justice. Multispecies justice is an emergent research program that views a diversity of humans and other-than-human beings as subjects of justice; and that seeks to reflect on how to transform our relations with other beings in accordance with this.

From a political ecology perspective, I will analyse how both human and non-human beings co-inhabit, co-create, and co-shape river systems. This will involve critically looking into how their agency and participation in rivers might be acknowledged, represented, and/or included in grassroots initiatives; and what consequences this may have in terms of political relations and processes. By doing multispecies ethnography in the Piatúa River in Ecuador and the Maas River in the Netherlands, I will focus on the following question: “How can the notion of multispecies justice help to conceptualise and support socio-environmental river defense and restoration practices in the biodiverse hydrosocial territories of the Piatúa and the Maas Rivers, and what are the main challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of applying this notion across scales, cultures, and contexts?”.

Serpis River, Spain

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Serpis, a Mediterranean river that runs from the city of Alcoy and flows into the Mediterranean sea in the town of Gandia, currently suffers from water pollution, the presence of invasive species and the alteration of the river regime (Aznar-Frasquet, 2015). Several actors have joined the “Plataforma Ciutadana per a la Defensa del Riu Serpis” aiming to exchange ideas to combat such problems. However, collective efforts have been challenging given the lack of agreement on issues such as whether the Serpis is a perennial or a temporal river that naturally runs dry during summer and whether the ‘azudes’ (weirs) that are not being officially used should be removed or modified to allow the free flow of the river.

PhD researcher: Ana María Trujillo

Worldwide, rivers face significant environmental challenges growing in frequency and severity: increased urbanization, industrial pollution,  hydroelectricity demands, and climate change are some factors that put rivers under pressure. Despite the implicit political character of such challenges, mainstream water governance tends to approach them as “natural problems affecting all of us” and propose technical solutions to solve them. Such focus leads to a lack of understanding of the political, justice, and democratic dimensions of river governance.

Aiming to address this gap, this research builds on concepts from political ecology and critical legal studies to understand divergent everyday experiences of environmental injustice and the pluri-legal mobilization strategies that riverine communities use to challenge them. The case studies of “La Miel” (Colombia) and “Serpis” (Spain) rivers will nurture the empirical basis of this work. To understand the particularities of both contexts, this research will use River Co-learning Arenas (RCAs) as the primary research method, which may include river walks, environmental justice workshops, in-depth interviews, and video exchanges. This research aims to contribute to conceptual thinking about environmental justice beyond universalism and to better understand the role of pluri-legal mobilization and global exchange of ideas in advancing river defense and environmental justice.

Lebrija River, Colombia

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Upper Watershed Lebrija River: The intensified process of urbanization, monoculture and mining extractive logics have severely impacted the overall well-being of the main river’s tributaries, creeks, páramos, and riparian forests. By tracing connections between the well-being and health of the river and the well-being of people’s livelihoods, women and peasant’s associations, as well as urban gardeners, researchers, and environmental activists are responding to the river’s pollution, deforestation, and water depletion along different parts of the upper watershed.

PhD researcher: Carolina Cuevas

This PhD action-research project sets out to critically examine the manifold attempts to regenerate, repair, and protect damaged riverine socio-ecologies in contexts of multiple socio-environmental injustices. Drawing from feminist political ecology, hydrosocial territories scholarship, and feminist conceptualizations on care, the aim of this research is to understand how have riverine hydrosocial territories been (re)configured through practices of care in response to multiple modern-colonial socio-environmental transformations. Thus, recognizing the contested nature of hydrosocial territories, and traveling between multiple human and more-than-human actors and temporal-spatial scales, this research will examine caring practices in their affective, ethical, political, and epistemic dimensions while attempting to understand how they have (re)configured riverine territories. To do this, through art-based methods and counter-cartographies stemming from feminist, decolonial, and participatory action-research methodologies, this research will study the upper basin of the Lebrija river in Colombia and the lower basin of the Guadalquivir river in Spain. Cross-pollinating these two case studies will allow to ponder how caring practices challenge the modern-colonial hegemonic human-water relations through which rivers are currently managed and governed, offering theoretical and methodological tools to support endangered riverine socio-ecologies and struggles towards intersectional socio-environmental justice.

Guadalquivir River, Spain

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Lower basin of the Guadalquivir River: The intensive monoculture of rice, olive trees, and berries, and the irregular groundwater extraction, has led to the over-explotation of the region’s aquifers and to the desertification of the whole lower area, especially along the marshes of the river’s estuary known as the Doñana wetland. The fierce agro-industry deployed in this territory is not only responsible of the over-exploitation of the land and water of the region, but of the appalling living and working conditions of migrant women labourers. Feminist and environmental activists, researchers, and local small farmers spread out along the lower river basin have pointed out the conflict between the socio-ecological integrity of the river and the exploitative paradigm of the agro-industry by pushing forward multiple initiatives (e.g urban gardens, agroecological education programs, restoration of creeks and riparian forests) as part of a ‘new water culture’.

PhD researcher: Carolina Cuevas

This PhD action-research project sets out to critically examine the manifold attempts to regenerate, repair, and protect damaged riverine socio-ecologies in contexts of multiple socio-environmental injustices. Drawing from feminist political ecology, hydrosocial territories scholarship and feminist conceptualizations on care, the aim of this research is to understand how have riverine hydrosocial territories been (re)configured through practices of care in response to multiple modern-colonial socio-environmental transformations. Thus, recognizing the contested nature of hydrosocial territories, and traveling between multiple human and more-than-human actors and temporal-spatial scales, this research will examine caring practices in their affective, ethical, political, and epistemic dimensions while attempting to understand how they have (re)configured riverine territories. To do this, through art-based methods and counter-cartographies stemming from feminist, decolonial, and participatory action-research methodologies, this research will study the upper basin of the Lebrija river in Colombia and the lower basin of the Guadalquivir river in Spain. Cross-pollinating these two case studies will allow to ponder how caring practices challenge the modern-colonial hegemonic human-water relations through which rivers are currently managed and governed, offering theoretical and methodological tools to support endangered riverine socio-ecologies and struggles towards intersectional socio-environmental justice.

Quimsacocha wetlands, Ecuador

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The Quimsacocha wetlands are an Andean páramo with natural fresh-water lakes. This highly sensitive environment is at constant risk because of urban pressure and large-scale mining activities (Duarte-Abadía & Boelens, 2016; Hidalgo-Bastidas et al., 2017; Mena-Vásconez et al., 2016). In Quimsacocha, the government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) promoted mega-mining projects under promises such as ‘Good living’ and ‘Water as Human Right’ aiming to introduce the idea of ‘Mining for the Good Living’ in communities’ imaginaries, representing mining as essential for societal progress and wellbeing (Valladares & Boelens, 2019). However, technical reports (Kuipers, 2016), suggest that such projects have high risks for the environment, the communities, and the water system.

The affected communities are resisting, framing new (re)territorialization processes through counter-conducts that challenge the dominant power and aim to generate new cultural-material hydrosocial territories (Boelens, 2015; de Vos et al., 2006; Hoogesteger et al., 2016). Farmers, indigenous groups, and environmentalists have been strongly protesting against these mining projects since 2004, advocating for their rights to access safe water supply, on which they depend for dairy farming, agriculture, and everyday life (Sacher & Acosta, 2012). Since 2019, the communities achieved the realization of two official consultations regarding the future of mining, opening up the possibility for citizens to prohibit mining activities in Quimsacocha (Acosta & Cajas Guijarro, 2020). In 2022, the FOA (Federación de Organizaciones Indígenas y Campesinas del Azuay) presented a legal protection that officially stopped the mining interventions in the area for being considered unconstitutional (Sánchez-Mendieta, 2022).

REFERENCES:

Acosta, A., & Cajas Guijarro, J. (2020). Democracia o barbarie minera. Cuenca por el agua, Cuenca por la vida.

Boelens, R. (2015). Water, Power and Identity: The Cultural Politics of Water in the Andes  [Book]. Taylor and Francis Inc. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315867557

de Vos, H., Boelens, R., & Bustamante, R. (2006). Formal law and local water control in the Andean region: A fiercely contested field [Article]. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 22(1), 37-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/07900620500405049

Duarte-Abadía, B., & Boelens, R. (2016). Disputes over territorial boundaries and diverging valuation languages: the Santurban hydrosocial highlands territory in Colombia. Water International, 41(1), 15-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2016.1117271

Hidalgo-Bastidas, J. P., Boelens, R., & Vos, J. (2017). De-colonizing water. Dispossession, water insecurity, and Indigenous claims for resources, authority, and territory. Water History, 9(1), 67-85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-016-0186-6

Hoogesteger, J., Boelens, R., & Baud, M. (2016). Territorial pluralism: water users’ multi-scalar struggles against state ordering in Ecuador’s highlands. Water International, 41(1), 91-106. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2016.1130910

Kuipers, J. (2016). Informe Pericial sobre los proyectos Loma Larga y Río Blanco. Provincia de Azuay.

Mena-Vásconez, P., Boelens, R., & Vos, J. (2016). Food or flowers? Contested transformations of community food security and water use priorities under new legal and market regimes in Ecuador’s highlands. Journal of Rural Studies, 44, 227-238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.02.011

Sacher, W., & Acosta, A. (2012). La minería a gran escala en Ecuador. Abya-Yala.

Sánchez-Mendieta, C. (2022, 14-07-2022). Loma Larga: segundo proyecto minero que se para en Cuenca. El Mercurio. https://elmercurio.com.ec/2022/07/14/segundo-proyecto-minero-paralizado-en-cuenca/

Valladares, C., & Boelens, R. (2019). Mining for Mother Earth. Governmentalities, sacred waters and nature’s rights in Ecuador. Geoforum, 100, 68-79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.009

PhD researcher: Catalina Rey Hernández

Worldwide, the management of rivers and riverine landscapes has been based on technocratic expert knowledge, involving top-down processes of landscape design, territorial planning, and related social-material transformations. These processes directly affect riverine communities and livelihoods, triggering local confrontations with -and adaptations to- the imposed designs and related forms of socio-material ordering. In this context, this research aims to better understand: a) how such riverine landscape design and territorial ordering plans are shaped and re-created by policies, institutional and normative practices, and specific powerful interest groups; b) how such designs transform socio-material relations and practices in local riverine communities; c) how communities resist, negotiate and transform the imposition of such designs and territorial ordering plans; and d) in which ways counter designs and counter geographies can support resistance groups and networks to express their own riverine understandings, aspirations, and interests. The research will focus on the cases of the re-design of the Berkel River (NL) and the contestations around large-scale mining projects in the Quimsacocha wetlands (EC). The research will build on insights from the social construction of technology scholarship and notions of actor-network theory to better understand and theorize the role of ‘designs’ in the contestation and transformation of riverine spaces in which a multiplicity of actors try to create a specific social, technological and environmental order (a hydrosocial territory).