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.
