Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice

Abstract

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

River Culture: Living with the River, Loving the River, Taking Care of the River

“…The authors of River Culture are campaigning for justice between upstream and downstream communities along rivers (especially in the case of dam construction and interbasin water transfer [Boelens et al 2022]), as well as between humans and non-human species, stating: "Those who have a snout or a beak cannot complain when all the water becomes deviated for irrigation or energy production, but they also have a right to live." Moreover, the authors warn that most natural floodplain wetlands and practically all river deltas are vanishing as a result of the blocking of environmental flows of water and transport of sediments by dam construction.…”

Heterogeneity of Water Justice and the Question of Nile Solidarity

“…The previous section demonstrated how the states have materialized the Nile through water infrastructure and legal arrangements as well as commodified it for exporting cash crops and producing energy. To scrutinize how civil society perceives the Nile, the notion of "Riverhood" is adopted and the conceptual framework developed by Boelens et al (2022). The authors demonstrate translocal activism in riverine communities to attain water justice and identify four entwined aspects to capture the struggle in the context of controlling rivers by state, technology, and market forces.…”

“…In this context, GERD is not an unanticipated project in the Nile; nevertheless, it intrudes into the meaning of water justice. Next, the article examines how three civil society actors configure the Nile by adopting the notion of riverhood, as connoted by Boelens et al (2022). The analysis is based on interviews conducted with civil society organizations and activists in 2018, 3 besides their statements and newsletters.…”

Engaging with Water and Rivers from a Multispecies Justice Perspective

“…These threats originate from a dominant, technocratic and anthropocentric paradigm that defines water management and governance according to specific human worldviews and economic and political agendas. In response, new water justice movements (NWJMs) have been arising that strive to defend and re-enliven riverine hydrosocial territories (Boelens et al 2022). As described by Boelens and colleagues, hydrosocial territorities are "the contested imaginary and socio-environmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network in which humans, water flows, ecological relations, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, legal-administrative arrangements and cultural institutions and practices are interactively defined, aligned and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, political hierarchies and naturalizing discourses" (Boelens et al 2016, 2).…”

“…Applying a multispecies justice framework to the defense, restoration and re-enlivening of rivers can help researchers, activists, local communities, environmental organizations and other actors to think about other relevant questions. These include: How are riverine hydrosocial territories co-constituted by a diversity of human and other-than-human beings, and consequently, how do processes of domestication, enclosure and degradation of the world's rivers (Boelens 2022) affect all these different communities? How are particular (human and non-human) subjects excluded from water governance processes?…”