CENTRE for LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH and DOCUMENTATION
CENTRE for LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH and DOCUMENTATION
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CENTRE for LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH and DOCUMENTATION
Dr. Bibiana Duarte Abadía
Bibiana Duarte Abadia is a committed scholar and researcher in the political ecology of water. Her work sits at the intersection of environmental justice, water governance, and hydrosocial territorial transformations. She has excellent skills in transdisciplinary and participatory action research. Her scientific publications have focused on critical issues such as water rights and conflicts, mechanisms for water accumulation, and the responses from affected communities.
RESEARCH INTEREST
She is particularly knowledgeable in the role of social movements in claiming water and environmental justice, specifically in Colombia and Spain. She is an expert in understanding the political and social dimensions of river co-governance, hydro-political history, and the political and economic causes of environmental conflicts, particularly in high-mountains and riverine landscapes. Bibiana is an active member of the International Alliance for Water Justice. Currently, she is interested in exploring "transgressive fluvial spaces," which enable societies to transition to cultural states that are better suited for living with rivers rather than battling them. She is researching the social feasibility of the Van Aa Naar Zee citizen initiative, which aims to reconnect the Westerwolde Aa river in Groningen with the Dollard estuary. From CEDLA (University of Amsterdam), she will support the coordination team of the River Commons and Riverhood Projects, which focus on river co-governance initiatives and new water justice movements and strategies for revitalizing rivers.
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
Travelling rivers, mapping movements. Counter-mapping and translocal river defense networks. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2025.
Capitalist grabbing and state-centralist interventionism degenerateand discipline rivers worldwide. Dominant cartographies re-presentrivers as extraction sites, legitimizing peasant, indigenous andfishing commons’ territorial erasures. As performative power-constructs, maps advance political decisions, designs, and claims torivers’ materialities and governance. Riverhood’s “Travelling Rivers”initiative connects grassroots artist-activism, scholar-activists andcommoning struggles through translocal counter-mapping. BridgingColombian and Ecuadorean river conflict-arenas, grassrootsknowledges, strategies and struggles converse and cross-pollinate,invigorating ‘living-with-river’ proposals and river-defense networks.River movements map, mapping moves rivers - as entangled socio-ecological communities. Grassroots counter-mapping among socio-fluvial struggles mobilizes new concepts and strategies to contestriver-grabbing, misrepresentation, and status-quo governance.
Boelens, R., Duarte-Abadia, B., Arbelaez-Trujillo, A.M., Forigua-Sandoval, J., Giraldo-Martinez, L., Reyes-Bejarano, S., Tubino-de-Souza, D., Silva-Orozco, J.S., Klarenbeek, M. & Zavala-Taday, S. Travelling rivers, mapping movements. Counter-mapping and translocal river defense networks. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2025.