Project description
River engineering through relational and decolonial perspectives
Rivers are essential to biodiversity and human well-being. However, hydropower-driven development, which is central to Europe’s decarbonisation strategy, often damages ecosystems and disrupts Indigenous livelihoods. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the RivERS project is developing a relational and decolonial approach to river engineering by integrating multispecies ethnography, cross-case analysis, and participatory methods to study human and more-than-human relationships in the hydropower-impacted Lule River in Sweden. It will examine how Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems interact and co-create understanding. Overall, the project will co-design new participatory frameworks for more ecologically and culturally sensitive river management.
Objective
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.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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651 88 Karlstad
Sweden
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