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Environmental Politics
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/fenp20
Power and politics across species boundaries:
towards Multispecies Justice in Riverine
Hydrosocial Territories
Carlota Houart, Jaime Hoogesteger & Rutgerd Boelens
To cite this article: Carlota Houart, Jaime Hoogesteger & Rutgerd Boelens (26 Apr 2024): Power
and politics across species boundaries: towards Multispecies Justice in Riverine Hydrosocial
Territories, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2024.2345561
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2345561
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UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
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Published online: 26 Apr 2024.
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Power and politics across species boundaries:
towards Multispecies Justice in Riverine Hydrosocial
Territories
Carlota Houart
a
, Jaime Hoogesteger
a
and Rutgerd Boelens
a,b
a
Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the
Netherlands;
b
Center of Latin American Research and Documentation, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Rivers have attracted increasing attention as politically contested entities.
Existing literature on hydrosocial territories sheds light on how power relations
and cultural-political hierarchies permeate rivers and their processes of territor-
ialization, management, and governance. Yet, so far, the multispecies dimension
of and in these processes remains under-addressed. This article helps ll in this
gap by weaving together two central concepts: hydrosocial territories and
multispecies justice. In this theoretical exploration we engage with rivers as
living entities and territories co-created, co-inhabited, and actively reshaped by
a diversity of human and other-than-human beings. We argue that acknowl-
edging the latter’s agency, as well as the multiple ways in which power and
politics constantly cross species boundaries in riverine territories, calls for
a dialogue with the notion of multispecies justice (MSJ). We pose that MSJ
can support, strengthen, and challenge movements, practices, and modes of
relationship around the defence, conservation, and restoration of rivers.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 25 October 2023; Accepted 15 April 2024
KEYWORDS Multispecies justice; hydrosocial territories; river politics; water justice; political ecology
1. Introduction
Alongside lakes and wetlands, rivers cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface
but host approximately 10% of all species, illustrating the fact that they are
amongst the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet (Tickner et al. 2020).
Carrying freshwater across vast distances and diverse landscapes, they are
essential not only for the livelihoods of human populations around the world
but also for the lives and habitats of countless other species and beings.
Nevertheless, many of the world’s rivers are threatened by industrial
CONTACT Carlota Houart carlota.silvahouart@wur.nl
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2345561
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the
Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
activities and extractivist infrastructures, ranging from dams and mega-dams
to mining, pollution, diversion, and depletion. This manipulation and degra-
dation of rivers is responsible for a decrease of more than 80% of global
populations of freshwater species since the 1970s (ibid.). It also reveals the
technocratic, anthropocentric, and mostly neoliberal character of the pre-
vailing norms within water management and governance regimes (Vos and
Boelens 2018, Whaley 2022).
Hydrocracies (hydraulic bureaucracies), functionalized by market-driven
regimes, tend to engage in river management and governance from the top
down and with utilitarian engineering perspectives (Molle et al., 2009;
Menga and Swyngedouw 2018; Owens et al., 2022). They operate within
a framework of western, industrialized modernity that seeks to conquer and
govern socionatures through (amongst others) infrastructures (Hommes
et al. 2022). The powerful ‘expert’ ontologies and epistemologies that deter-
mine these interventions are usually embedded in capitalist, extractivist
imaginaries that disregard alternative river knowledges and relations, as
well as non-human beings and their needs (Boelens et al. 2023).
Ongoing processes of industrializing and degrading rivers are being met
with various forms of societal response and resistance. New networks and
movements for river defence, conservation, and restoration on local,
national, and international levels have been emerging throughout the last
couple of decades (Hoogesteger et al., 2023). These place-based, culturally
specific, and yet also trans-locally allied initiatives have been conceptualized
as ‘new water justice movements’ (NWJMS) (Boelens et al. 2023). NWJMS
challenge existing power relations, river management strategies, institutions,
and policies at different scales.
Based on this recognition, in this article we depart from a political ecology
perspective that is especially attentive to how power and politics affect
human and other-than-human lives and actors. Specifically, we engage
with rivers as multispecies contact zones that are permeated by profoundly
asymmetrical power relations and structured by histories, knowledge sys-
tems, and political economies that position other-than-human beings as
subordinate to humans (Collard 2015). We answer the following question:
how can theories and practices of multispecies justice (MSJ) challenge and
enrich the struggles of new water justice movements (NWJMS) in contested
riverine hydrosocial territories?
The article is based on literature review, activist engagement in
national and international river defence networks, river walks and river-
side meetings,
1
and political-conceptual debates with academic and grass-
roots collectives, in five continents, from January 2021 to December 2023.
It prompts an important, new conversation between the notions of hydro-
social territories and MSJ. The following sections focus on each of these
concepts, weaving them together to tell not-only-human stories of (in)
2C. HOUART ET AL.
justice in river worlds and river lives (Van Dooren et al. 2016). We
demonstrate that a broader, more inclusive and plural, less anthropo-
centric perspective on issues of (in)justice in rivers – namely through
engagement with the notion of MSJ – can challenge, strengthen, and
support the practices and modes of relationship that contribute to the
defence, conservation, and restoration of socio-ecologically sustainable,
biodiverse rivers. The final section thus reflects on what MSJ can bring
into NWJMS working with rivers.
2. Riverine hydrosocial territories: agency, power, and politics
beyond the human
2.1. Rivers as contested hydrosocial territories
In this section we introduce the concept of hydrosocial territories because it
allows us to look at rivers as sites of ongoing contestation, transformation,
and political (re)imagination. This concept invites us to understand rivers as
spaces (and/or as living entities) that are socially, culturally, and politically
constituted through interactions among multiple actors (e.g. Hommes et al.
2022, Drapier et al. 2023).
Boelens et al. (2016, p. 2) offer a conceptual framework for analysing
hydrosocial territories as contested imaginaries and socio-environmental
materializations of spatially bound multi-scalar networks that are interac-
tively defined and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, natur-
alizing discourses, and political hierarchies. Hydrosocial territories are thus
the outcomes of interactions between diverse actors, in which the latter’s
imaginaries, knowledge systems, and social practices create the boundaries,
contents, and connections between nature and society (ibid.). Discourses
around hydrosocial territoriality thereby combine power and knowledge
(Foucault 1980) to create a specific political order as if it were natural,
establishing fixed links and apparently logical relations between a specific
group of actors, objects, and concepts that define both the nature of pro-
blems and the solutions to overcome them (Boelens et al. 2016).
To illustrate: rivers around the world are fragmented by dams and weirs that
were built for the (human) purposes of navigation, water supply, flood control,
or hydropower development (Benitez et al. 2022). In the Netherlands, for
instance, specific actor communities (e.g. hydraulic engineers, Water Boards)
are defined as the experts who can identify pressing issues (e.g. flood risks) and
priorities (e.g. more navigable rivers for more efficient trade routes).
According to these experts’ views, such problems and priorities have been
answered by building said infrastructure.
Over time, canalizing and damming rivers such as the Maas or the
Rhine became the natural order of things that defines nature-society
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 3
relations in a certain way, overlooking alternative modes of engage-
ment with rivers. Moreover, these hydraulic engineering norms and
practices that arose in countries like the Netherlands have been extre-
mely mobile, being transferred to other geographical, political, and
cultural contexts (e.g. Latin America) and becoming a ‘new’ natural
order of things there too.
What may be viewed as normal or inevitable according to underlying
norms of economic development, human security, or technocracy
(Zwarteveen and Boelens 2014) may also constitute an imposition of
power and political hierarchy upon other actors – including the more-than-
human world. The fragmentation of rivers by dams leads to the alteration of
upstream and downstream habitats, breaks river connectivity, alters a river’s
natural flow, interrupts the migration routes of different species, etc (Benitez
et al. 2022). In most cases, then, removal of barriers might well be ‘the
preferred solution through the eyes of a fish’ (Brevé et al. 2014, p. 207).
But conservation and restoration in large lowland rivers tendentially hap-
pens within the framework of the socio-economic services that these rivers
support (e.g. navigation, flood protection, agriculture, freshwater supply)
(Stoffers et al. 2021). Consequently, other-than-human beings’ interests
and needs usually come second – or are simply disregarded – in mainstream
river management.
Yet, these dominant narratives have been more recently counterposed by
groups of social actors (e.g. environmental organizations) who seek to
advance other norms and forms of cultural politics, namely through rewild-
ing, ‘nature development’, etc. A case in point involves the Dutch river Maas,
where the Grensmaas project (hailed as the largest river restoration project in
Europe) seeks to ‘undo 500 years of world-renowned Dutch water engineer-
ing’ by expanding and rewilding the river’s floodplains (The Guardian 2022).
Environmental organizations are advancing a picture of the river as less
controlled by infrastructure and (re)populated by a growing diversity of
animal and plant species (De Jong et al. 2024).
Hydrosocial territoriality can therefore be understood as ‘a battle of
divergent (dominant and non-dominant) discourses and narratives’ that
has ‘consolidating a particular order of things as its central stake’ (Boelens
et al. 2016, p. 7). Either imagined, planned, or already materialized, hydro-
social territories have contested meanings, values, and functions, as they
determine processes of inclusion and exclusion, development and margin-
alization, and distribution of benefits and burdens that affect a variety of
living beings (ibid.). Whereas most literature has so far focused on processes
of territorialization, political struggles, and water (in)justices within human
societies and between human actors, it can be directly applied to multispecies
communities.
4C. HOUART ET AL.
2.2. Non-human agency in riverine hydrosocial territories
The agency of other-than-human beings in the co-creation and transforma-
tion of river systems has been receiving increasing attention in river sciences
and research. For example, Druschke et al. (2017) critically explore the
agency of fish in dam removal decisions. Through an analysis of Rhode-
Island’s Wood-Pawcatuck watershed in the USA, they call for an acknowl-
edgment of the distributed agency underpinning dam removal decisions that
makes these much more than strictly technocratic processes (ibid.).
Druschke et al. look at the ways in which migratory species such as river
herring and resident species such as brook, rainbow, and brown trout have
been influencing human decisions concerning several dams along the
watershed; and they insist that both managers and theorists should pay
attention to how fish actors might defy scientific predictions and techno-
cratic expectations (ibid.). By arguing that ‘fish are central actors in dam-
removal practice, tying river systems and multiple species back together
through connectivity and creating newly constructed realities of river health
and human-fish relations’, these authors provide a clear example of how
other-than-human beings are contributing to the transformation of hydro-
social territories (ibid.: 726). They suggest decentring human agency in fish
passage projects to look at human-nonhuman relations from a different
perspective, namely one that invites restoration managers to co-create dam
removal projects in collaboration with fish themselves (ibid.).
In line with this view, Goedeke and Rikoon (2008) argue that animals,
plants, soil, water, and others must be included in restoration narratives and
projects, given that how these projects turn out requires the compliance of
human and other-than-human beings to scientific predictions, and they are
all involved in social conflicts. Goedeke and Rikoon’s argument is based on
their analysis of how other-than-human beings, especially otters, contribute
to establishing, challenging, or stabilizing networks in a river restoration
project in Missouri, USA.
People, fish, and river otters have historically co-inhabited the streams
and woods of Missouri with differing levels of success (ibid.). River otters
were almost driven to extinction by the mid-1930s due to habitat reduction
and hunting. Otter trapping was banned in the state in 1937, and in the early
1980s the Department of Conservation launched a project to restore otter
populations. What ensued was a successive shift in discourses, actions, and
policies by different groups of people (e.g. DoC, scientists and academics,
animal rights organizations) in relation to otters. State and non-state
approaches to otter reintroduction transformed because otters responded
differently to what was expected of them on multiple occasions. They exerted
their own agency in the ways they reproduced, inhabited, and spread across
the state (ibid.).
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 5
Based on this example (amongst others), we recognize, together with
Goedeke and Rikoon (2008), that other-than-human actors have immense
potential to challenge and transform networks, recruiting human and non-
human beings alike. Their analysis illustrates how non-human and human
agency, at once and interrelated, is constantly deployed in the (re)shaping of
riverine hydrosocial territories. This also implies that hydrosocial territories
are plural, overlapping and interweaving in the same geographical spaces.
We explore this below.
2.3. Agency, pluralism, and diversity in riverine hydrosocial territories
Territories and their constitutive elements (e.g. boundaries, relations, objec-
tives, technologies, resources) are disputed and contested both from within
and from the outside, as different subjects aim to shape territory according to
their own interests (Hoogesteger et al. 2016). Territory and how it transforms
is determined by human and other-than-human actors, interests, and power
relations. Hoogesteger et al. (ibid.) use the term ‘territorial pluralism’ to
highlight that diverse territories overlap, interact, and conflict in the same
geographical space. This leads to the existence of ‘territories-in-territory’ that
have partially similar constitutive elements and relations, although these are
ordered in different, often opposing ways. Importantly, ‘once a territory (or
a particular “territory-in-territory”) is constituted, it becomes an organizing
element of human/nonhuman interactions, influencing both nature and
society’ (ibid.: 93).
We argue that different human and other-than-human actors have parti-
cular territorial projects, deliberately aiming to (re)shape a riverine territory
in specific ways. A case in point is presented by Woelfle-Erskine and Cole
(2015, p. 298), who describe a trip up the Columbia River, USA, where they
saw how ‘beaver works inevitably transgress private property lines, interrupt
human irrigation and landscape schemes, and shift fence-able pastures and
orchards toward dynamic patchworks of thicket, meadow, stream, bog, and
woods’. In their view, the beavers they encountered physically decolonized
the controlled territories of the Columbia River, tying the river system and
species back together in different ways to those of human engineers and
technocrats – ways through which the beavers’ and other species’ needs are
actually better met (ibid.).
We would add that such beavers’ behaviour is a form of territorial politics
against their displacement. Beavers create the conditions for many species’
flourishing through their daily activities (ibid.). Tree-felling and dam-
building raise the level of streams and create ponds and flood dynamics
that foster the habitats of multiple species. This reminds us that multiple
territorialization processes co-exist in the same space. While human hands,
infrastructures, and technologies aimed to create a specific order for the
6C. HOUART ET AL.
Columbia River, beaver paws, teeth, and tails transformed and recreated
another Columbia River, facilitating ‘the emergence of whole worlds of
creatures and [enabling] new kinds of relations among them’ (ibid.: 308).
The beavers’ actions changed not only the organization of riverine space but
also human understandings of beavers and actions towards them over the
past century. Discourses portrayed them first as furbearers, later as habitat
maintenance tools, and more recently as ecosystem engineers (ibid.).
As such, beavers (like other species) constantly disrupt anthropogenic
hydrosocial territories – as well as the human imaginaries of how these
territories should be ordered and sustained – through multispecies relations
and materialities. That is, they co-constitute alternative multispecies hydro-
social territories. These examples, involving fish, otters, and beavers, help us
to conceptualize non-human beings as active co-creators of riverine hydro-
social territories, inviting an expansion of understandings of subjecthood
and agency beyond the human.
Indeed, dominant narratives of rivers have long ignored, silenced, or
rendered invisible other-than-human beings as agents in socio-political
and environmental processes. Yet, outside them, other ontological under-
standings exist that acknowledge rivers and their multispecies communities
differently. In the following section, we engage with plural river ontologies
and their relevance for discussions of subjecthood and agency beyond the
human.
3. Engaging with plural river ontologies: subjecthood beyond the
human
When different groups talk about a river, are they talking about the same
‘thing’? (Götz and Middleton 2020, p. 2)
Outside dominant (technocratic, anthropocentric) river ontologies, rivers
are also known as persons and subjects. Krenak (2019, p. 21) describes the
Rio Doce in Brazil using the following words: ‘The Rio Doce, which we, the
Krenak, call Watu, our grandfather, is a person, not a resource, like the
economists say’. For the Māori of New Zealand, rivers are not just entities
that exist for human beings to inscribe meaning onto and to transform,
control, degrade, and restore; instead, they are understood as more-than-
human actors with agency, power, and a life force, as well as being relatives
and ancestors to particular human groups (Parsons et al. 2021). Such onto-
logical understandings of rivers find resonance among non-western and
indigenous cultures across the globe (Kauffman and Martin 2018).
Poelina and colleagues (RiverOflife et al. 2021) translate the Martuwarra
Fitzroy River’s voice into human words according to Aboriginal Australian
imaginaries that extend the concepts of subjecthood, agency, voice, culture,
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 7
and others to rivers. According to these imaginaries, rivers too are actors that
constitute, shape, and reshape hydrosocial territories inhabited by
a multiplicity of human and non-human beings. Similarly, Laborde and
Jackson (2022) examine how Aboriginal Australians ontologically situate
the Martuwarra as a living being involved in myriad, reciprocal relations
with different beings and materialities, including humans, animals, plants,
and spirits. ‘Water is conceived as an integral part of social and political life
and its meanings emerge from relationships that extend across the bound-
aries of human and non-human’ (ibid.: 8).
These plural, lively, and relational ontological understandings of rivers
have historically led to specific modes of relationship with them – especially,
modes of relationship that preserve, protect, or seek to restore the integrity of
rivers and their multispecies communities. This shows that ontologies,
narratives, and imaginaries are always necessarily political: they materialize
in very concrete practices and are deeply embedded in (most often asymme-
trical) power. That is why, in the following section, we engage with
a discussion of ontological politics and how they operate within and across
riverine hydrosocial territories.
4. Ontological politics and the (re)making of (multispecies) rivers
Götz and Middleton (2020, p. 2) note that ‘hydrosocial thinking has been
especially strong in critically scrutinizing the potential implications of “mod-
ern” Water that reduces it to its mere, material, physical dimensions, namely
H2O, and rendering Water separate from society’. Far from being neutral,
‘claiming water as H2O is a profound assertion of political power’ (ibid.).
Laborde and Jackson (2022, p. 1) argue that ‘regulators and practitioners
acting within modernist water institutions take for granted their own analy-
tical categories to make sense of their water management challenges, and do
not take seriously the ontological diversity of waters’. This has important
practical consequences.
Of relevance here is what Tănăsescu (2022) calls the descriptive-
prescriptive nexus: how we describe the world fundamentally informs
how we act upon it. In line with that point, choosing to acknowledge
particular river ontologies (that might include or listen to some subjects
while excluding or silencing others) is necessarily and inherently a matter
of justice. If particular (e.g. western/modernist, technocratic, anthropo-
centric, capitalist) river ontologies have been leading to rivers’ degrada-
tion, then we are called to look for other (e.g. non-western/vernacular,
plural, relational, multispecies) ontologies that perceive rivers as an
assemblage of beings who each play unique roles that are essential for
the integrity and socio-ecological sustainability of rivers; and who are
entangled in networks of life, death, vulnerability, and resilience/
8C. HOUART ET AL.
resistance. Essentially, we are called to ‘a world of kin, grounded in
a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us
together, vulnerable and responsible to one another’ (Van Dooren and
Chrulew 2022, p. 2). Plural river ontologies can co-exist in tension and in
contradiction with each other but are not mutually exclusive; in some
cases, they even merge into new hybrids that mix elements from different,
seemingly incompatible river ontologies (Escobar 2018).
Many alternative river ontologies have become visible in some of the
NWJMS that engage in river defence across the globe (Boelens et al. 2023).
Several of them have advocated for the recognition of specific rights and legal
personhood status for rivers (Kauffman and Martin 2021). Emblematic cases
include the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador (Berros 2017); the Atrato in
Colombia (Macpherson et al. 2020); the Whanganui in New Zealand
(Magallanes 2020); the Ganges and Yamuna in India (Kinkaid 2019); the
Martuwarra Fitzroy and the Muteshekau-shipu Magpie in Australia and
Canada, respectively (Page and Pelizzon 2022).
Broadly aligned under the Rights of Nature (RoN) umbrella, the actors
involved in these river cases constitute a diverse group of people and
organizations. While some of these cases set remarkable precedents for
what their proponents argue to be less anthropocentric paradigms (e.g.
Whanganui) or reflect the importance of connecting RoN with the uphold-
ing of indigenous territorial and cultural rights (e.g. Martuwarra), others
have revealed the inherent tensions and challenges associated with RoN (e.g.
Ganges and Yamuna) or the difficulties in implementing RoN on a national
scale within the parameters of a global capitalist economy (e.g. Ecuador).
Although pervaded by challenges, contestation, and their own power
dynamics and processes of subjectification (Immovilli et al. 2022), these
movements also hold important potential for debating and restructuring
human-nonhuman relations in riverine hydrosocial territories. Our brief
look into the plurality of river ontologies and ontological politics in the
previous sections shows that rivers are always multispecies hydrosocial
territories; and that power and politics constantly cross species boundaries,
requiring us to reflect on issues of (water) justice from a broader, less
anthropocentric lens. To that end, in the next section we engage with the
concept of multispecies justice (MSJ) and bring it into dialogue with rivers as
hydrosocial territories.
5. A multispecies justice perspective on rivers
5.1. Introducing MSJ
MSJ departs from the basic acknowledgment that all living beings are born
into and make their lives within multispecies communities (Van Dooren
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 9
et al. 2016). This means that human societies are always embedded within
larger communities of life that entangle an innumerable diversity of beings
(e.g. humans, animals, plants, ecosystems) in shared networks of living,
dying, and the (re)making of worlds.
The entanglement of human and other-than-human lives in these shared
worlds is, as we have already seen, profoundly influenced by power relations,
asymmetries, and political hierarchies. MSJ invites us to consider a broader
variety of beings (both individuals such as human animals, nonhuman
animals, plants; and communities of subjects such as ecosystems) as subjects
of justice (Celermajer et al. 2021). In other words, MSJ ‘expands the relation-
ships of justice to include human responsibilities to all earth beings’ (Winter
and Schlosberg 2023, pp. 2–3).
The term multispecies justice has been adopted by a growing number of
scholars who in many ways explore issues of (in)justice in multispecies
worlds (e.g. Tschakert et al. 2020, Celermajer et al. 2021, Kirksey and Chao
2022). A genealogy of the concept, tracing the contributions it has been
gathering from disciplines and fields as diverse as STS, animal rights
theories, ecofeminism, environmental justice, posthumanism, indigenous
and decolonial thought, cultural anthropology, political ecology, among
others, can be found elsewhere (e.g. Celermajer et al. 2021, Kirksey and
Chao 2022). Still, it is essential to state that the foundational ideas of MSJ
are not all new; several of them reflect principles and understandings that
have been prevalent (in multiple ways) among many, non-western, indi-
genous cultures and knowledge systems around the world (Winter and
Schlosberg 2023). As an emerging research agenda, MSJ is inherently
transdisciplinary, breaking the apparently hard boundaries between the
social and the natural sciences and distinctions between subject and object
(both in science and research and in the multispecies worlds we co-inhabit)
. Given its commitment to deconstructing some of the central tenets of
western modernity (e.g. anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism), MSJ is
not only a research program but also – fundamentally – a normative project
(Celermajer et al. 2021).
Its normative core stems from a deliberate rejection of the fiction of
individualism in favour of the acknowledgment of the actual ecological
array of relationships that sustain life (ibid.). By doing so, it points to
a broader socio-ecological reality of which humans are only one part (albeit
a particularly impactful one): ‘Here, human and nonhuman animals, species,
microbiomes, ecosystems, oceans, and rivers – and the relations among and
across them – are all subjects of justice. Consequently, multispecies injustice
comprises all the human interruptions of the functioning of this broad array
of relations’ (ibid.: 127). This definition is important because it points to the
relationality of the concept: justice in multispecies worlds (including rivers)
pertains not only to the subjects who co-inhabit the latter, but also to the
10 C. HOUART ET AL.
relations binding them together. As such, particular modes of relation that
endanger rivers might be seen as unjust and in need of transformation;
whereas others that foster their integrity and sustainability may be seen as
promoting MSJ.
As Winter and Schlosberg (2023, p. 2) argue, justice theories have pre-
dominantly focused on something other than material relationships, ‘when
in reality any conception and practice of justice is necessarily enmeshed in
them’. Regarding rivers, these material relationships can include pollution or
hydro-extractivism as examples of injustice; or forms of activism for river
defence and river conservation or restoration projects as examples of justice.
They suggest that ‘any approach to justice that is to guide human behaviour
on a relational, ecological planet needs to incorporate recognition of that
relationality, and have the reflexivity to address the ways that human beha-
viours affect it’ (ibid.).
Through an intersectional approach to justice, MSJ recognises that multi-
ple identities and categories of difference and inequalities are simultaneous
(e.g. race, class, gender, ability, species, being) and that they intersect each
other in structures and processes of oppression and injustice (Tschakert et al.
2020). Given the immense diversity of beings that co-inhabit multispecies
worlds such as rivers, as well as their many forms of subjecthood, agency, and
modes of expression and voice, MSJ challenges us to nurture arts of atten-
tiveness (Van Dooren et al. 2016) and practices of active listening (Rose
2013). These are profoundly political because they directly relate to processes
of inclusion/exclusion and of (mis)recognition of diverse subjects.
Regarding riverine hydrosocial territories, applying a MSJ lens to river
management and governance might imply asking questions such as: when
damming a river or when designing a river restoration project, whose
perspectives, needs, and interests are decision-makers considering? Who
are, in fact, the decision-makers, and who are they representing? How can
we invite other-than-human beings at the decision-making table? If we want
to include other-than-human perspectives, who can speak on behalf of non-
human beings? What gives particular human actors the legitimacy or exper-
tise to do so? And how are these processes inherently inclusive and exclusive?
Who ‘decentres’ who? (Houart 2023).
Naturally, widening the circle of those whose voices we seek to listen to
when discussing practices of (in)justice in rivers renders the discussion
profoundly more complex. MSJ ‘emerges within fields of power where who
is in the world, and whose world counts, is at stake. Any project that aims to
achieve justice in multispecies worlds should thus ask: justice for whom or
what?’ (Kirksey and Chao 2022, p. 6). Indeed, two important points must be
raised here. Firstly, it must be emphasized (again) that although MSJ is
a recent and developing concept, most of its ontological, epistemological,
and ethical-political premises have been part of the cosmologies, knowledge
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 11
systems, ethics, and modes of relation with the more-than-human world of
multiple indigenous cultures and vernacular societies for thousands of years
(Celermajer et al. 2021). MSJ does not, therefore, represent a set of ideas
developed just (or mainly) by western academia. Epistemologically, then, it
must recognize and be in constant dialogue with other knowledge systems
and forms of knowledge production that have been historically silenced
(Thaler 2021). Its emancipatory project is thus directly relevant to human
subjects, not only to non-human beings.
Secondly, although it may be argued that a main goal of MSJ is to
‘decentre the human’, such a move must not amount to perpetuating
forms of excluding or rendering invisible particular groups of human actors
that are already deeply impacted by asymmetrical power relations and the
global capitalist economy (Fitz-Henry 2021). Tensions and potential contra-
dictions are necessarily part of MSJ, for example in its connection with the
RoN movement and how it has been differently adopted by grassroots
movements (bottom-up) or imposed by external or more powerful agents
(top-down). Fitz-Henry’s (2021, p. 13) question is pertinent: ‘How can we
ensure that “attending to the communication of non-humans” such as crows,
snails, or trees, does not neglect (and therefore risk alienating) huge seg-
ments of the human population whose “communication” has long been
silenced, distorted, appropriated, or otherwise attacked?’.
The concerns falling under the umbrella of MSJ (e.g. river degradation;
interruption of migratory routes; species extinction; endangerment of the
livelihoods of riverine communities) should matter to a broader range of
individuals, for multiple reasons. MSJ must, then, engage with people ‘who
will not share some of the more radical commitments that have been at the
heart of the multispecies turn – but who would benefit in their own ways
from the protection of multispecies systems and relations’ (Celermajer et al.
2021, p. 134). Nonetheless, to ensure legitimacy and transformative potential,
MSJ must explicitly engage with the ongoing political struggles and more
‘radical’ political claims of marginalized human communities and groups
across movements as diverse as Black Lives Matter or those striving for
indigenous sovereignty (Fitz-Henry 2021). Not doing so would amount to
perpetuating forms of injustice between human actors and make it ‘impos-
sible to build the sorts of grassroots movements that will be required to
fundamentally transform the liberal [and illiberal, technocratic, authoritar-
ian] state[s] in the coming years’ (ibid.: 18).
Consequently, we advocate for MSJ frameworks that are not about decen-
tring any human per se, but about decentring and deconstructing specific,
dominant human ontologies, systems, and modes of relationship regarding
the more-than-human world (e.g. especially those that rely on the belief in
human exceptionalism and legitimize exploitation and destruction of rivers
and their multispecies communities). In dialogue with Rose and Plumwood,
12 C. HOUART ET AL.
the task at hand is ‘to resituate the human in ecological terms, and . . . to
resituate the non-human in ethical terms’ (Rose, 2015 apud Van Dooren and
Chrulew 2022, p. 12). Next, we suggest that broadening the scope of justice to
include a growing diversity of other-than-human subjects and a much larger
number of human subjects are not mutually exclusive; rather, they should be
aligned through an intersectional approach to justice (Tschakert et al. 2020)
that acknowledges that these countless subjects are all exploited and
oppressed by global capitalism.
Finally, we would add, from our political ecology perspective, that any
MSJ framework must always be self-reflexive, critical of the ways in which
seeking to include (e.g. listen to and speak on behalf of) non-human beings
might also perpetuate processes of subjectification and practicing power over
these beings. This point is crucial, because bringing other-than-human
subjects into political decision-making processes is – to some extent –
inevitably a matter of human intermediation and interpretation. Decision-
making might not always be in human hands (e.g. as in when otters or
beavers defy scientific predictions and technocratic expectations to (re)
populate and (re)shape riverine territories according to their own interests),
but river management and governance is still heavily/mostly determined by
human actors. Acknowledging and opening space for other-than-human
beings to actively participate in decision-making processes is therefore
a central part of the challenge, while remaining aware of how those processes
entail their own power relations and political hierarchies across species
boundaries is key.
5.2. Do forms or practices of MSJ in rivers already exist?
Beyond utopian interpretations and demands for a MSJ future (Thaler 2021),
our core interest is in more specific forms or situated practices of MSJ that
already exist, woven into particular modes of relationship between human
communities and other-than-human beings, or as forms of environmental
activism for river defence.
In the Magdalena River, Colombia, for instance, local artisanal fisher(wo)
men claim that fish have a voice that they can hear, and that they are able to
predict the weather according to what animals tell them (Boelens et al. 2021).
Importantly, the close relations binding the artisanal fishing communities
and the fish together also manifest in the development of ethical principles
that determine particular practices as illegal (to the contrary of what national
authorities legislate). Fishing in the areas where fish are sleeping, for exam-
ple, is forbidden among the artisanal fisher(wo)men. These situated practices
and the principles underlying them might be understood as a form of MSJ,
since they not only demonstrate care and respect for the fish, but also seek to
safeguard the socio-ecological sustainability of the river (e.g. by posing limits
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 13
on fishing that not only ensure sustained livelihoods for the fishing commu-
nities but also the future of other species).
Yet, fish populations in the Magdalena are dwindling, threatening the
futures of both human and non-human beings, because of overfishing, loss of
river connectivity caused by the existence of hydroelectric dams, deforesta-
tion, etc. (ibid.). The artisanal fisher(wo)men of the Magdalena are not
regarded as political actors by the Colombian state, meaning that their
ontological understandings of the river (and the modes of relationship with
the river and its multispecies communities that they encourage) are not
acknowledged in the management of this hydrosocial territory. Achieving
MSJ in this case might thus also imply including the voices of the artisanal
fishing communities into political decision-making processes about the
river’s management and governance (as grassroots organizations are trying
to do). These not only better represent the needs and interests of the
(vulnerable) humans, but also, indirectly, those of the non-human beings
with whom they share this territory.
Practices of MSJ in rivers may be seen as an attempt to produce new or to
defend already existing modes of relationship between human and other-than
-human beings. In line with this, in the next section we explore how new
water justice movements (NWJMS) that seek to defend, conserve, and/or
restore rivers can be challenged and enriched by a MSJ perspective.
5.3. Bringing MSJ into new water justice movements (NWJMS)
We suggest that bringing a MSJ perspective into NWJMS involves two
important dimensions: creating diverse networks of actors and bridge-
building across fields and disciplines. On the one hand, a diverse network
of actors could include: riverine local communities and indigenous peoples;
scientists and academics; legal activists and scholars; environmental activists
and NGOs; concerned citizens; bureaucrats and politicians; among others. It
is key to connect groups of actors with potentially different ontological
understandings of rivers (e.g. indigenous communities and natural scientists;
social and natural scientists; peasant communities and environmental acti-
vists), who might nevertheless find common ground in their concern for
rivers and might provide complementary contributions for working on their
behalf – while shedding light on differences between actors’ needs and
interests; and trying to better respond to them by transforming power
relations and political hierarchies.
Such coalitions can engage as active political subjects in the defence of
rivers and their multispecies communities. They have the potential to jump
scales and develop political agency through grassroots scalar politics
(Hoogesteger and Verzijl 2015) and the development of rooted water collec-
tives (Vos et al. 2020). The deliberate inclusion of multiple species and their
14 C. HOUART ET AL.
respective needs, knowledge, experience, and interests in a wider circle of
justice can add new dimensions to the struggles and demands of these
movements and collectives.
Furthermore, it is also vital to build bridges across fields and disciplines,
which enact and develop different epistemologies and methodologies, such
as arts and sciences, or activism and academia. To critically look at and
engage with rivers through a MSJ perspective is ultimately a challenge for
activists, researchers, scientists, policymakers, artists, citizens, and others
who care about the fate of rivers and their multispecies communities in the
present context of socio-environmental injustices, river degradation, biodi-
versity loss, and climate change to co-create pathways into different futures.
Examples of this (to name just a couple) already exist, for instance the diverse
Riverhood and River Commons action-research endeavours that bridge
rivers’ human/non-human communities trans-locally,
2
or in the work of
Wölfle Hazard (2022), which connects river sciences with the work of
indigenous nations, local citizens, artist collectives, and others.
A central question, which constitutes one of the fundamental challenges
for all proposals dealing with the inclusion and representation of the more-
than-human world, is how to know the perspectives, needs, and interests of
other-than-human beings when we are human. Multiple discussions around
issues of voice and communication beyond the human have been taken up by
scholars for decades (e.g. Plumwood 2002, Eckersley 2004, Latour 2004,
Schlosberg 2009, Rose 2013, Van Dooren et al. 2016; Meijer, 2019; etc.).
We draw inspiration from all of them but would like to mention here
Eckersley’s (2004, p. 211) proposal for the development of ecological democ-
racy, which suggests that: ‘All those potentially affected by a risk should have
some meaningful opportunity to participate or otherwise be represented in
the making of the policies or decisions that generate the risk’. This includes
future generations and other-than-human beings. For their representation,
Eckersley suggests the appointment of representatives taking on a trusteeship
role, which should include people with ‘firsthand knowledge or experience of
non-human nature’ (ibid.: 141).
It is not our intention in this paper to argue for any specific form of
inclusion of non-human beings, since that discussion would merit signifi-
cantly more space and attention, but rather to point out the existence of
several proposals for it that offer pathways for overcoming anthropocentric
and exclusionary practices in political decision-making. We do, however,
argue that it is key to involve the politically excluded, the economically
marginalized, the culturally and epistemically discriminated in terms of
river’s voices. As Ottinger (2023, p. 1) argues, movements for environmental
justice have long criticized the value and importance predominantly placed
upon scientific expertise, ‘often to the exclusion of the knowledge and values
of people most affected by’ different forms of environmental harm. Ottinger
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 15
offers an account of epistemic justice that she terms careful knowing, mean-
ing ‘practices of empirical investigation and meaning-making responsive to
the needs of marginalized knowers’ (ibid.: 2). Opening space for other-than-
human beings therefore also calls for the deployment of creative methods
and performances that invite human actors, for example, to temporarily
adopt the perspective of another being in order to empathize and seek to
better understand what this being might want of their river. Examples
abound, including Macy’s Council of All Beings, or the indigenous-led
Land and Peoples Relationship Model
3
(see also Wölfle Hazard 2022).
The fact that other-than-human beings do not communicate through the
same spoken language as humans does not mean that they do not have
a voice or modes of expression (e.g. signals, gestures, behaviours) that
humans cannot listen to or comprehend. Understanding what other-than-
human beings are communicating is always a matter of interpretation, but
the same happens with humans (Latour 2004). Likewise, ‘in opening one’s
self to others as communicative beings, one places one’s self in a position of
being able to experience communication’ (Rose 2013, p. 97). Indeed, ‘(. . .) as
other creatures live their lives, so they communicate aspects of themselves’
(ibid.: 98). To this respect, ‘contesting for better worlds requires learning to
take others seriously in their otherness (. . .) It also requires learning new
modes of taking account of and with enigmatic others who cannot be – or
perhaps do not want to be – represented or even knowable or sensible within
any available mode of understanding (. . .)’ (Van Dooren et al. 2016, p. 16).
In the end, this implies that the normal/normalizing terms of engagement,
conversation, and territory-configuration must be shifted. Rather than ‘inte-
grating’ and selectively cherry-picking local, indigenous, or vernacular riv-
erine multispecies ontologies into established science and preconceived river
restoration (which reinforces dominant science and mono-ontological water
orders), there is a need for identifying intercultural, reciprocal, and decolo-
nial co-constructions of river socionatures. These start with pluri-ontological
and multispecies reality; with vernacular, convivial epistemologies; with care-
full hydrosocial territorialization – and then look for complementarities and
solidarities (Yates 2022). Such reciprocal coalitions cross and interlace riv-
erine contexts and movements, challenge river extractivisms, re-politicize the
environmental debate, river policies and ‘single-species’ design approaches,
and open up new modalities for acknowledging, strategizing, and constitut-
ing riverine territories.
6. Conclusions: opening space for other-than-human beings in
river defence eorts
Haraway (2008, p. 105) writes that ‘a liveable world is remade with
disregarded human persons and other displaced beings, or not at all’. In
16 C. HOUART ET AL.
this article we started an important conversation between two concepts –
hydrosocial territories and multispecies justice – and their research and
normative programs. Engaging with the existing literature on hydrosocial
territoriality through a MSJ perspective encourages us to acknowledge
non-human beings (e.g. rivers, otters, fish, beavers, algae, etc.) as active
co-creators and transformers of riverine hydrosocial territories, just as
much as humans.
As co-inhabitants of rivers and co-participants in their territorialization
processes, non-human beings are also constantly impacted by power rela-
tions, political processes and hierarchies that are often led by (specific groups
of) humans within dominant political economies. Issues of (in)justice in
river worlds and river lives are therefore always, necessarily, issues of multi-
species justice. Bringing a MSJ perspective into NWJMS working for the
defence, conservation, and/or restoration of rivers encourages these move-
ments to include a wider variety of subjects into their projects, both as fellow
sufferers and subjects affected by processes of dispossession, loss, destruc-
tion, and death/extinction; and also, as partners and collaborators in pro-
cesses of resistance, transformation, and response to these various forms of
socio-environmental injustice.
We have argued that taking on a MSJ lens when discussing issues of river
conservation and restoration means to ally with other-than-human beings in
the defence and re-enlivening of multispecies riverine hydrosocial territories.
In some cases, this can occur by inviting them into hydrosocial territorial
designs (e.g. through the protection of existing species; through dam removal
projects that include the agency of fish; through the reintroduction of species
like beavers or otters, and collaboration with them to restore river biodiver-
sity and health). In other cases, it can imply appointing human representa-
tives to intermediate and speak on behalf of the more-than-human world
when deciding on specific projects – especially human representatives who
have also historically been marginalized and silenced by settler-colonial and
capitalist states.
This introductory conversation paves the way for further topics and
angles of research. One of them might be looking into what practices of
MSJ already exist on the ground, in grassroots movements, in specific modes
of relationship between human and other-than-human beings in riverine
hydrosocial territories, to encourage cross-pollination and potentially
strengthen multispecies justice efforts in other spaces and geographical,
political, and cultural contexts. Another one might entail reflecting on how
MSJ might contribute to the decolonization of modes of relationship
between particular groups of humans by adopting an intersectional approach
that builds bridges with social justice movements. Finally, another one might
focus on exploring what kind of new practices for MSJ in NWJMS might
arise through citizens assemblies, citizen science, creative methodologies,
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 17
intercultural and intersectional dialogues, and socio-environmental activism
on local and trans-local scales, through weaving webs of human and more-
than-human co-creation.
Notes
1. River walks, counter-mapping and riverside meetings (www.movingrivers.
org) were also a form of conducting multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and
Helmreich 2010), which is particularly pertinent to reflections on multispecies
justice.
2. www.movingrivers.org
3. https://www.respectcareshare.ca/
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This article was written as part of research being developed within the project
“Riverhood: Living Rivers and New Water Justice Movements” at Wageningen
University, the Netherlands. Riverhood has received ERC funding under the EU’s
Horizon 2020 program (grant no. 101002921).
ORCID
Carlota Houart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7428-6852
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