Living Rivers and the New Water Justice Movements: From Dominating Waterscapes to the Rights of Nature

RIVERHOOD will study, conceptualize and support evolving water justice movements that struggle for enlivening rivers. Notwithstanding rivers’ fundamental importance for social and natural well-being, around the world, mega-damming, pollution, and multiple forms of domesticating are putting riverine systems under great stress. Expert ontologies and epistemologies have become cornerstones of powerful hydraulic-bureaucratic administrations (‘hydrocracies’).
Recently, worldwide, a large variety of ‘new water justice movements’ (NWJMs) have proliferated. These are rooted, transdisciplinary, multi-actor and multi-scalar coalitions. They deploy alternative river-society ontologies and practices, challenging hydrocracies’ paradigms to foster environmental justice. They translate global notions into local ones and vice versa. New, exciting strategies range from organizing river-health clinics, dam removal, socio-ecological flow projects, to mobilizing New Water Culture and Rights of Nature notions. European NWJMs co-learn with peers in Ecuador and Colombia were rivers are legal and political subjects. NWJMs hold immense potential for contributing to a radically new, equitable and nature-rooted water governance, but are undertheorized, largely unnoticed by natural and social sciences, and excluded from policy-making. Science and policies lack approaches to engage with rivers as arenas of co-production among humans and nature.
RIVERHOOD will develop a new analytical framework to study NWJMs and ‘riverhoods’. Socio-natural river complexes will be approached from 3 interrelated ontologies: ‘river-as-territory’; ‘river-as-subject’; and ‘river-as-movement’. Through 4 cross-cultural PhD studies, 8 cases in Ecuador, Colombia, Spain and the Netherlands are investigated. At each site ‘Environmental Justice Labs’ will be organized: a novel approach to comprehend pluriversal water worlds and foster knowledge co-creation and democratization: bottom-up, dialoguing and transdisciplinary.”