Methodology

The project will focus on all those cases in Brazil where legal rights have been granted to rivers/waterbodies. These cases include, among others, the following:

1. In 2018, for the first time in Brazil, the small municipality of Bonito in the rural Drylands of Pernambuco granted rights to its water sources. 
2. In 2023, the rural municipality of Guajará-Mirim (Rondônia) granted legal personhood to the Laje River in the Amazon River Basin; the first time for a Brazilian river to be granted legal personhood.
3. Inspired by the legal case of the Laje River, in 2024, the City Council of Goiás, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, granted legal rights to the Vermelho River (Goiás) to protect the river from decades-long toxic pollution and deforestation.
4. Also in 2024, the urban municipality of Linhares (Espírito Santo) granted the waves at the mouth of the Doce River legal rights to protect the surrounding marine ecosystem; the first time anywhere in the world that a part of the ocean was granted legal rights.  

Each case is situated in a different Brazilian state, involving a different river/waterbody with diverse geographies (rural, semi-urban, and urban), local stakeholder constellations and kinship histories. This comparative angle will reveal new patterns in kinship thinking, historical trajectories, and legal-political activities in the implementation of river rights.

The project will develop a novel kin-centric rights framework inspired by the provisory concept “riverkin” co-developed by the Leeds-based PL (MF) (Cohen et al. 2023). Riverkin understands rivers as kinship, re-establishing a human relationship with the planet’s ecosystems that has been marginalised in the “modern” world. Rather than regarding rivers as mere commodities to be exploited for human use (transportation of goods, energy production and agricultural production), a kin-centric understanding builds an awareness of our intrinsic relationship with nature. The development of the framework will provide a conceptional grounding to explore and map different indigenous and non-indigenous meanings of kin-related understandings of rivers, the historical sidelining of river rights and those socio-political power dynamics that act as barriers to a paradigm change today. 

To develop this framework, this project will combine the methods of participatory cartography and historical cartography to unearth local communities’ hidden riverkin-centric meanings and practices that have been marginalised and obscured by the state and other powerful actors that have shaped the idea of rivers as commodities. 

1) Participatory Cartography: Through interviews and co-creation workshops we will co-create visual representations (maps) that highlight local communities’ social relationships with their rivers, as well as existing and historical power dynamics to explore how these relationships have shaped the RoN movement’s advocacy efforts for river rights.

2) Historical Cartography: In parallel, we will conduct archival research to map the impact of long-standing riverkinship traditions, as well as their sidelining, at our case study rivers/water sources. This aspect of our research will situate contemporary advocacy efforts for river rights in a historical context of traditional kinship thinking and local communities’ loss of river rights. We will rely on historical maps and other historical documents to explore the rivers’ economic importance attributed by past political institutions (e.g., the colonial state) and the ethnicities and biomes in their surroundings.