Governing rivers as legal persons: Developing a kin-centric rights framework to address Brazil’s river crisis

Brazil’s large rivers and ecosystems, not least the Amazon River Basin, are fundamental in regulating the South American and global climate. But Brazil’s rivers are under threat. Devastating droughts and rivers with record-low water levels are the ‘new normal’. Many river basins are heavily polluted by toxic mining activities and industrial agriculture, which have resulted in devastating ecological disasters, destroying indigenous and riverine communities’ livelihoods, wrecking ecosystems and pushing many animal species closer to extinction. A growing body of literature regards the modern understanding of rivers as commodities to be exploited for material gain as the root of this river crisis. 

Since 2018, the Brazilian Rights of Nature (RoN) movement has secured legal rights for several rivers and water bodies across Brazil. The global RoN movement advocates for the recognition of non-human beings and parts of nature (rivers, forests and mountains) as legal persons. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the project will critically explore to what extent the RoN movement can confront the status quo view of rivers as commodities and establish a novel paradigm inspired by kinship practices. A kin-centric understanding sees rivers as kin-like persons and part of an ecological family intimately intertwined with our own health and wellbeing. This kin-centric understanding of rivers can inspire new river governance models to improve legal and political protections for rivers, their ecosystems and riverine communities in Brazil and worldwide. 

The project will analyse the RoN movement’s efforts in advocating for river rights; map kin-centric understandings of rivers among RoN movement members and riverine communities; explore historical riverkinship ideas to illustrate the loss of riverine communities’ river rights and identities over time; and develop a kin-centric rights framework to support activists and policymakers in implementing and enforcing river rights.

To develop this framework, the project will combine the methods of participatory and historical cartography and focus on four emblematic case studies in four different Brazilian states where rivers and water bodies have been granted legal rights for the first time in Brazilian history.