Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RIVERHOOD (Living Rivers and the New Water Justice Movements: From Dominating Waterscapes to the Rights of Nature)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30
Rivers are depleted, contaminated, dammed, and diverted worldwide. Governmental environmental legislation is often permissive and monitoring ineffective, and climate change is aggravating the already deplored state of many rivers. At the same time many riverine communities have a deep connection to rivers, and care for them. Groups of concerned citizens, environmental activist movements, affected communities of peasants and fishermen, and their umbrella organizations play a crucial role in defending and enlivening rivers. Local river collectives often form into regional and national networks and can forge international alliances to increase inventiveness and effectiveness of their activities. They creatively translate global river revitalization and defence ideas into local strategies, and vice versa. This way, these New Water Justice Movements (NWJMs) devise and deploy new hybrid languages, concepts, values, practices and strategies. They embed these, for instance, in campaigns, protests, river clean-ups, citizen science monitoring, petitions, legal claims and political advocacy. However, commercial interests of private companies, ideals of modernization, and overall lack of valuing of ecosystems are strong. Moreover, in many countries environmental activism is being repressed. This, coupled with the fact that the science and policy worlds lack the conceptual frame and methodological tools to understand and support these NWJMs, makes that they commonly operate below the radar and find it difficult to have their original, creative and constructive voices heard.
Identifying, understanding and supporting NWJMs – which includes a new way of understanding rivers themselves as socio-ecological communities, ‘riverhoods’ - are the main objectives of the RIVERHOOD project. This is very important as they play a crucial role in voicing and defending the interest of rivers. Thereto, by enlacing academic and action-research, RIVERHOOD seeks to study, comprehend and simultaneously build trans-cultural, cross-boundary bridges and network relations among river defence collectives in the global South and North. RIVERHOOD’s main objective is to build new 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.
Identifying, understanding and supporting NWJMs – which includes a new way of understanding rivers themselves as socio-ecological communities, ‘riverhoods’ - are the main objectives of the RIVERHOOD project. This is very important as they play a crucial role in voicing and defending the interest of rivers. Thereto, by enlacing academic and action-research, RIVERHOOD seeks to study, comprehend and simultaneously build trans-cultural, cross-boundary bridges and network relations among river defence collectives in the global South and North. RIVERHOOD’s main objective is to build new 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.
At the start, 3 postdocs and 4 PhD researchers were internationally recruited and the coordination team was set up. A globally renowned Scientific Advisory Board (SAC) was installed, and a worldwide partners-network built on the foundations of the PI-coordinated Water Justice Alliance: interconnecting local, national and global scales and integrating grassroots, policy-makers, scholars, from social and natural sciences.
RIVERHOOD’s political ecology research concentrates around 8 case studies in 4 countries: Ecuador, Colombia, Spain and The Netherlands. Each PhD researcher articulates a European and Latin American case study.
Carolina Cuevas investigates the Arenal (Colombia) and Dílar/Monachil rivers (Spain) with art-based methods and counter-cartographies. First field research shows how caring practices support intersectional socio-environmental justice through NWJMs. Co-learning involves grassroots collectives in both countries.
Catalina Rey-Hernández studies extractive industry influence around Ecuador’s Quimsacocha river complex and re-design of the Dutch Berkel river. Territorial ordering plans are shaped by policies and power groups, but counter designs seek to support and express people’s riverine worlds. Spatial-ethnography and muti-actor river walks stand central.
Carlota Houart deploys multispecies ethnography in Ecuador’s Piatúa and Dutch Meuse rivers to understand river enlivening through multispecies justice (MSJ). Bridging cases, opportunities of MSJ are scrutinized across scales and cultures. First results show human and non-human beings co-creating river systems, which demands MSJ recognition in policy and grassroots initiatives.
In Colombia and Spain, Ana María Arbelaez-Trujillo uses critical legal studies to investigate everyday environmental injustices and communities’ pluri-legal mobilization strategies to defend La Miel (Colombia) and Dílar/Monachil and Serpis rivers (Spain). Initial networking cooperation is achieved with peasant-environmental movements in both countries.
Besides the intensive field research, the team has organised numerous exchange and dissemination activities, led by post-docs Daniele Tubino, Bibiana Duarte, Lena Hommes, (now replaced by) Leontien Cremers: workshops, riverwalks, counter-mapping, research seminars, summer school, webinar series, webpage, newsletter, and participation in international conferences and events. Illustrative is the ‘Water Forum’ in Quito in which we gathered 1000 participants.
RIVERHOOD’s political ecology research concentrates around 8 case studies in 4 countries: Ecuador, Colombia, Spain and The Netherlands. Each PhD researcher articulates a European and Latin American case study.
Carolina Cuevas investigates the Arenal (Colombia) and Dílar/Monachil rivers (Spain) with art-based methods and counter-cartographies. First field research shows how caring practices support intersectional socio-environmental justice through NWJMs. Co-learning involves grassroots collectives in both countries.
Catalina Rey-Hernández studies extractive industry influence around Ecuador’s Quimsacocha river complex and re-design of the Dutch Berkel river. Territorial ordering plans are shaped by policies and power groups, but counter designs seek to support and express people’s riverine worlds. Spatial-ethnography and muti-actor river walks stand central.
Carlota Houart deploys multispecies ethnography in Ecuador’s Piatúa and Dutch Meuse rivers to understand river enlivening through multispecies justice (MSJ). Bridging cases, opportunities of MSJ are scrutinized across scales and cultures. First results show human and non-human beings co-creating river systems, which demands MSJ recognition in policy and grassroots initiatives.
In Colombia and Spain, Ana María Arbelaez-Trujillo uses critical legal studies to investigate everyday environmental injustices and communities’ pluri-legal mobilization strategies to defend La Miel (Colombia) and Dílar/Monachil and Serpis rivers (Spain). Initial networking cooperation is achieved with peasant-environmental movements in both countries.
Besides the intensive field research, the team has organised numerous exchange and dissemination activities, led by post-docs Daniele Tubino, Bibiana Duarte, Lena Hommes, (now replaced by) Leontien Cremers: workshops, riverwalks, counter-mapping, research seminars, summer school, webinar series, webpage, newsletter, and participation in international conferences and events. Illustrative is the ‘Water Forum’ in Quito in which we gathered 1000 participants.
Two years from the start, RIVERHOOD has already inspired numerous scholars, students and grassroots leaders: engaging academia and society with how formal and local cultures differently imagine; showing how rivers can be understood as part of society, as co-productions among human and non-human communities.
The first 27 RIVERHOOD publications have opened academic and society eyes to seeing river complexes from four interrelated dimensions:
a). River-as-Ecosociety: how river complexes are socionatural systems configured by, at once, local hydrology, ecology, climates and human cultures and interventions across space and time scales.
b). River-as-Territory: how different actors imagine river systems as socionatural territorial complexes and materialize their wished-for ‘hydrosocial territories’.
c). River-as-Subject: how formal and vernacular water cultures deploy ontologies and epistemologies to approach rivers as moral, legal, political subjects.
d. River-as-Movement: how new multi-actor, multi-scale water justice movements produce innovative ‘riverhood’ by articulating experiences, views, tools and strategies across contexts.
Progress beyond the state of the art has been made in the following themes:
1. Development of the conceptual approach of “Riverhood” through our Q1 publication in the Journal of Peasant Studies, co-authored by 30 leading scholars. The framework is already deployed by scholars and movements worldwide.
2. Showing the large diversity of approaches of NWJMs through the first 27 Riverhood publications and dissemination activities. The approaches used by NWJMs include: multi-species resistance, counter-geographies, legal mobilization, rights of nature, and art-based activities to connect human and non-human river communities.
3. The development of methodologies to “bridge” river movements across continents: through the innovative River Co-learning Activities (RCAs). One series of activities organized was the successful testing of the counter-mapping methodology with communities during the
Travelling Rivers initiative organized in Colombia and Ecuador, and registered in an award-winning documentary.
It is expected that the field research and exchange activities will yield much more insights into the rootedness, functioning and effectiveness of trans-local river movements. This will result in new thinking about the relations between human and non-human river communities, inspiring both river movements and academia across the globe.
The first 27 RIVERHOOD publications have opened academic and society eyes to seeing river complexes from four interrelated dimensions:
a). River-as-Ecosociety: how river complexes are socionatural systems configured by, at once, local hydrology, ecology, climates and human cultures and interventions across space and time scales.
b). River-as-Territory: how different actors imagine river systems as socionatural territorial complexes and materialize their wished-for ‘hydrosocial territories’.
c). River-as-Subject: how formal and vernacular water cultures deploy ontologies and epistemologies to approach rivers as moral, legal, political subjects.
d. River-as-Movement: how new multi-actor, multi-scale water justice movements produce innovative ‘riverhood’ by articulating experiences, views, tools and strategies across contexts.
Progress beyond the state of the art has been made in the following themes:
1. Development of the conceptual approach of “Riverhood” through our Q1 publication in the Journal of Peasant Studies, co-authored by 30 leading scholars. The framework is already deployed by scholars and movements worldwide.
2. Showing the large diversity of approaches of NWJMs through the first 27 Riverhood publications and dissemination activities. The approaches used by NWJMs include: multi-species resistance, counter-geographies, legal mobilization, rights of nature, and art-based activities to connect human and non-human river communities.
3. The development of methodologies to “bridge” river movements across continents: through the innovative River Co-learning Activities (RCAs). One series of activities organized was the successful testing of the counter-mapping methodology with communities during the
Travelling Rivers initiative organized in Colombia and Ecuador, and registered in an award-winning documentary.
It is expected that the field research and exchange activities will yield much more insights into the rootedness, functioning and effectiveness of trans-local river movements. This will result in new thinking about the relations between human and non-human river communities, inspiring both river movements and academia across the globe.