In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. River futures influence the way adaptation projects are implemented in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, thereby sidelining and delegitimising alternative river futures. So far, limited work has been performed on the power of river futures in the context of climate change adaptation. We conceptualised the power of river futures through river imaginaries, i.e., collectively performed and publicly envisioned reproductions of riverine socionatures mobilised through truth claims of social life and order. Using the Border Meuse project as a case study, a climate change adaptation project in a stretch of the river Meuse in the south of the Netherlands, and a proclaimed success story of climate adaptation in Dutch water management, we elucidated how three river imaginaries (a modern river imaginary, a market-driven imaginary, and an eco-centric river imaginary) merged into an eco-modern river imaginary. Importantly, not only did the river futures merge, but their aligned truth regimes also merged. Thus, we argue that George Orwell’s famous quote, “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” can be extended to “who controls the future, controls how we see and act in the present, and how we rediscover the past”.
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Worldwide, rivers face challenges due to human and climatic pressures. Floods, droughts, pollution, damming and hydropeaking are only a few examples of these pressures, and influence the way rivers flow. Climate change adaptation projects increase the incentive to domesticate rivers, often legitimised through expert views on (future) vulnerability and risk. This emerging river imaginary dominates current debates in many rivers in our world. River imaginaries reflect spatially bound hydrosocial territories in which multiple actors on multiple scales from multiples sectors operate to reach varying objectives. They include water flows, ecological systems, climate conditions, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks and information/knowledge hubs. In the context of climate change adaptation, river imaginaries are strongly dependent on the extent to which climate change is expected to influence rivers through a mixture of probable, possible, desirable or preferable versions of a (future) river. As such, knowledge-structures of future making are scrutinised in this research by emphasising on the role of change, the role of futures and the role of experts. This presentation aims to elucidate how river imaginaries have influenced river management under climate change adaptation that resulted in large infrastructural projects. Through a study of the Meuse river, a concrete case of a imaginary came into being in the Dutch-Belgian Border-Meuse trajectory. Moreover, preliminary result from adaptation projects in the marshlands of the lower Magdalena in Colombia strengthen the dominate imaginary of technocratic and ecocentric approaches to climate change adaptation where an expert view on local knowledge dominates.
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The research group ‘Community resilience, participation and social learning’ of theprofessorship Sustainable River Management at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, in the Netherlands explores the contribution of community art and visual arts in relation to complex public participation processes in a context of sustainability.
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Rivers all over the world are deteriorating in a fast rate. As a response, movements in the defence of rivers emerge and aim to restore and protect rivers. One of these defence strategies is to politicise fish to generate arguments for the protection of rivers, drawing from a fish-friendly river imaginary. The concept of river imaginaries describes that power is exercised through and by knowledge generated in truth regimes. In this poster presentation, we elaborate on two cases in which fishing people and their allies use a variety of truth strategies, resonating with specific fish-friendly river imaginaries. Both case studies are influenced by harmful mining and industry practices that pollute the river and wetland.The Dutch case study of the Border Meuse river reveals that the main argument to politicise fish is that infrastructural interventions and hydropower is killing and damaging fish. Through knowledge generating on the amount of fish-death and the aquatic state, a knowledge agenda is set and power is exercised to stop harmful river activities. The Colombian case of the Zapatosa wetlands reveals that the main argument to politicise fish is that fish is the main source of food. Through knowledge generating that focusses on re-learning from past artisanal fishing strategies and biocultural adaptation, a knowledge agenda is set and power is exercised to stop harmful mining practices. Although these river movements are using truth regimes to defend rivers, counter facts, counter norms, and counter agendas in the defence of harmful practices remain to exist.
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The Living Lab approach has become popular and developed in the past decade. It could provide a configuration to pursue a shared vision of integrated water resources management of the Citarum River in West Java - Indonesia. The multi-stakeholder situation and the growing recognition of interdependencies among stakeholders foster the complexity of addressing sustainable river management for the Upper Citarum River. To gain insights on essential competencies and adaptations in higher education curricula, the Environmental Engineering Department of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering-ITB, Telkom University Indonesia, and Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, joined hands in a collaborative research project. This study aims to develop a socio-engineering aspect for sustainable river water quality management in the Environmental Engineering Field and Curricula. The methods used are social imaginaries of Participatory Mapping and a Poetry Route that allowed the involved river bank communities to activate their role and take positions in the living lab. Institutional stakeholders, acting in a facilitating role, learned to gain and share information from and with the community. The result concludes that social imaginaries methods enable a new perspective in developing community-based programs and advocate further exploring the socio-engineering competencies of environmental professionals.
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At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
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For environmental governance to be more effective and transformative, it needs to enhance the presence of experimental and innovative approaches for participation. This enhancement requires a transformation of environmental governance, as too often the (public) participation process is set up as a formal obligation in the development of a proposed intervention. This article, in search of alternatives, and in support of this transformation elaborates on spaces where participatory and deliberative governance processes have been deployed. Experiences with two mediated participation methodologies – community art and visual problem appraisal – allow a demonstration of their potential, relevance and attractiveness. Additionally, the article analyzes the challenges that result from the nature of these arts-based methodologies, from the confrontational aspects of voices overlooked in conventional approaches, and from the need to rethink professionals’ competences. Considering current environmental urgencies, mediated participation and social imaginaries still demonstrate capacities to open new avenues for action and reflection.
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This article focuses on engagements with elephants in diverse contexts, inquiring why some scholars are indifferent or even actively opposed to discourses that emphasise elephant suffering. In order to address this question, this article will explore three interrelated streams within social science: one that criticises conservation as an elitist, neo-colonial enterprise; one that is preoccupied with the social construction and cultural interpretation of natural phenomenon; and a third sometimes referred to as the new conservation science that focuses on economic valuations of the benefits nature, viewing “nature is a warehouse for human use.” https://doi.org/10.1080/13880292.2016.1204882 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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The main hypothesis underlying this article is that although arbitrators are not formally part of national justice systems, they have dealt with questions of EU fundamental rights and the European rule of law standards for quite some time, at least formally since the landmark CJEU judgment in Eco Swiss in 1999. In fact, in all forms of arbitration, be it national or international, taking place in or across (Member) States daily and not necessarily concerning the application by arbitrators of EU law stricto sensu, arbitrators can be seen as guardians of many crucial procedural guarantees that increase parties’ access to justice and advance the European rule of law, or so we wish to argue. This article is an exploratory piece. That is, it combines the format of the state-of-the-art review with the format of conference proceedings through which we present the main activities of the DG Justice TRIIAL project concerning arbitration. Our main goal is three-fold: (1) to advance the discussion on the relationship between the European rule of law and arbitration, (2) to present the main findings stemming from research and training activities within the TRIIAL training workshops on arbitration, and (3) to formulate future research and practical questions on the topic at hand.
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Western societies are quickly becoming less coherent (Giddens, 1991). As a result it is increasingly unclear how individuals should act in a range of situations or how they may understand themselves. To a certain extent this development towards more diverse perspectives and a broader range of ways to act is a positive one, as cultures can only develop as they are confronted with different perspectives. A uniform culture would simply reach a standstill. That said, current society now demands of its citizens that they become increasingly self-reliant and by extension develop a capacity to be self-governing. On the labour market self-reliance and self-determination have been considered par for the course even longer. It is no surprise then that terms like self-direction, self-governing teams, employability and resilience are considered part of the standard repertoire of politicians and employers (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2017). Within the social sciences, an ability to be self-governing and self-reliant are terms that are associated with the concept “agency”. However, the latter is a fairly vague, multidimensional concept (Arthur, 2014) that refers to the ‘scope of action’ an individual has in a fluid society (Bauman, 2000). In this article we would like to explore the concept of ‘agency’ further whereby we focus on the role of imagination in enacting it. https://doi.org/10.1177/1038416218777832 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/
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