Rethinking River Engineering: Ecologically Just, Relational, and Situated

Descripción del proyecto

La ingeniería fluvial desde perspectivas relacionales y descoloniales

Los ríos son esenciales para la biodiversidad y el bienestar humano. Sin embargo, el desarrollo impulsado por la energía hidroeléctrica, que ocupa un lugar central en la estrategia de descarbonización de Europa, a menudo daña los ecosistemas y perturba los medios de vida de los pueblos autóctonos. Con el apoyo de las Acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, el equipo del proyecto RivERS desarrolla un método relacional y descolonial de la ingeniería fluvial mediante la integración de la etnografía multiespecie, el análisis comparativo de casos y métodos participativos para estudiar las relaciones humanas y no humanas en el río Lule, en Suecia, afectado por la energía hidroeléctrica. Se examinará cómo interactúan los sistemas de conocimiento autóctonos y científicos y cómo crean conjuntamente un entendimiento. En general, en el proyecto se codiseñarán nuevos marcos participativos para una gestión fluvial más sensible desde el punto de vista ecológico y cultural.

Objetivo

Rivers support some of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems and are vital to long-term human and ecological well-being. European climate and energy policies strongly promote hydropower to meet decarbonisation and energy security goals, yet its expansion drives biodiversity loss and disrupts Indigenous livelihoods. River management remains dominated by engineering approaches rooted in modernist, anthropocentric frameworks that reduce rivers to extractable resources while sidelining ecological, cultural, and Indigenous knowledge. As a result, relational perspectives – recognising rivers as living beings in relationship – remain marginalized. Yet they offer ecocentric approaches with profound implications for sustainability.
RivERS advances a relational and decolonial rethinking of river engineering. Its ambition is to reorient foundational assumptions toward plural and just futures for rivers and their living communities by integrating more-than-human perspectives. Combining multispecies ethnography, cross-case analysis, and participatory methods, it will: (O1) investigate human and more-than-human entanglements and frictions within the hydropower regime of Sweden’s Lule River, including impacts on Sámi livelihoods and riverine ecology; (O2) trace how relational knowledge is co-created across Indigenous and techno-scientific systems; and (O3) co-design participatory frameworks and tools for river engineering that enable culturally responsive, pluralistic, and ecologically sensitive practices.
RivERS benefits from a strong interdisciplinary environment at Karlstad University (Sweden) and Simon Fraser University (Canada). By bridging anthropology, STS, and ecology, it delivers context-sensitive knowledge and tools, laying the foundation for long-term transformation in engineering that strengthens socio-ecological resilience, biodiversity conservation, and just water governance.