It is a 5-years project that will study ‘riverhood’ and ‘translocal water justice movements’ in Europe and Latin America. This project will be coordinated from the Wageningen University (WUR) with an strong bridge to CEDLA-UvA. The proposal counted also with invaluable inputs from many of the CEDLA's research team. We are specially glad because the proposal’s evaluation was graded as ‘excellent’ and ‘exceptional’.

The project will start in Spring 2021. The project includes 4 fully financed PhDs and the means to develop, among other activities, ‘environmental justice labs’ in The Netherlands, Spain, Ecuador and Colombia, with a large number of grassroots, academic and policy-making partners. The total grant is 2 million euros.

 

ABSTRACT: “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 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 include, among others, 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’. 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.”