River rights: currents, undercurrents and free-flowing planetary vistas

BRARA, RITA; BERROS, MARÍA VALERIA

Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History,

White Horse Press

Año: 2022 vol. 15 p. 490 - 519

1973-3739

This paper focuses on the recognition of rivers as a subject of rights in countries and cultures of the Global South from an interdisciplinary perspective. As a legal academic and a sociologist, our intent is to enquire into the socio-legal arena of legal personhood of rivers. The article proceeds in three sections. In the first one, we outline the main currents in the formal legal doctrine concerning the grant of rights to rivers. The second section brings to the surface the undercurrents which contour these legal resources in different national cultures - political, religious, and ecological - and perhaps predictably give rise to diverging socio-legal trajectories. To illustrate this section we focus in judicial rulings emerging from Colombia, New Zealand, and India. In the third and last section, we outline an imaginary that envisions rights of rivers as free-flowing and planetary. La revista Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History se encuentra indizada en SCOPUS, Portico, Locks.