By Carlos Y. Flores (text and photos) In January 2023, the whole Riverine Rights research team met in New Zealand for a workshop and trip along the Whanganui River. Read Carlos Flores’ report of the experience here.
Registers of Loss, Pain, Hope, and Climate Change in India. Rahul Ranjan, Postdoc for the Riverine Rights project and Shalini Iyengar, a PhD candidate at Yale University, co-organised the lecture series this fall term 2022. In the epoch of Anthropocene, the vocabulary of loss and pain is commonplace. Defined variously, this epoch surfaces in violent … Read more
Two members of the Riverine Rights, Rahul Ranjan and Catalina Vallejo, were invited to New York. Both of them presented research work on the law and rights of nature
By John-Andrew McNeish John-Andrew McNeish participated in the research workshop “Indigenous Forms of Ownership in the Contexts of Extractivism and the Anthropocene: Ethnographic Comparisons from South America”. The workshop was held from the 1st to the 3rd of September at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
By Catalina Vallejo Our team members Catalina Vallejo and Rahul Ranjan attended the launch of the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project on September 22-24 in Tarrytown, NY State (USA). This project is an initiative of the Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law … Read more
By Kavita Upadyay In the first in-person meeting in the two years since the project began, the Riverine Rights project’s team met in India in April, 2022. Led by Axel Borchgrevink, the team members from Norway, New Zealand, and India met in New Delhi on April 22 for a two-day workshop organised by Bibhu Prasad Nayak. Titled ‘Rivers … Read more
Spring comes around and the scenery around us comes alive once again! Jamie accidentally falls into a river and, feeling wronged by Mother Nature, decides its time to learn about them. Know thy enemy, I guess. Your hosts depart for the eastern parts of India where they’re gracefully welcomed by Rahul Ranjan, postdoc fellow at … Read more
Another Indian researcher, Kavita Upadhyay, will be working on the case study of the Uttarakhand High Court’s decision to grant legal personhood to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
Malene Karensdatter Brandshaug has been hired as a new postdoctoral research fellow. She will primarily be studying local efforts at creating rights for rivers in Peru.
Elizabeth Macpherson wins a new award for her book “Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience” (Cambridge University Press).
Facing downwards, sideways, or sometimes hazed, the camera forms an angular relationship with the river, as Siddharth wrestles as he walks on the uneven edge of the river’s bank built by a long history of deposited sediments – folded in time of a river so different from what we know now. The documentary begins as … Read more
Over the past three months, a lecture series was organised as part of the “Riverine Rights project: The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Right of Rivers”. The series is a continuation of the OsloMet South Asia Seminar Series hosted in the early Spring 2021.
Remarkable climatic events are leaving footprints on human memory. These events, particularly within mountainous and deltaic regions in South Asia, are a microcosm of a gradual shift in the environment or a result of climate change. Most of this emerge from systemic exploitation of the natural environment – constructions of dams and roads in the … Read more
Miriama Cribb, from Whanganui, New Zealand, and working on a PhD project on the implementation of the Ta Awa Tupua legal personhood Act, is now affiliated with the Riverine Rights project.
New chapter by Whitney Richardson and John McNeish in open access edited book on extractivism and resource governance. Our Extractive Age is Open Access and can be downloaded here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48472
Details of the project task and responsibilities, required qualifications can be found here: https://www.oslomet.no/en/work/job-openings/post-doctoral-fellowship-position-in-socio-legal-studies
Travelling through the bank of rivers often evokes a poetic charm. The meandering river, its serpentine movements are folded in stories – changing chapters as it breathes through the landscape of city, towns and kasbahs. Each story uncovers a unique riverine spirit.
On April 13, María Ximena González Serrano offered a presentation about her work and reflections about the Atrato river case. Ximena worked with the local communities and social organizations in Chocó between 2010 and 2018, and she supported the documentation and litigation process in defence of the Atrato River. She was co-founder and co-director of … Read more
Rahul Ranjan, Postdoc at OsloMet and researcher of the Riverine Rights project, has published his reflections on mourning after the flood disaster in Uttarakhand last month.
On February 23, Dr. Anindita Pujari gave a lecture titled: Locating Riverine Personality Judgement in Indian Law at a Riverine Rights digital seminar. Dr. Anindita Pujari is an advocate of the Supreme Court of India and holds a PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been involved in a number of supreme court landmark … Read more
One of the project participants of the Riverine rights project, Elizabeth Macpherson has received an award for her book ‘Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience’ (CUP 2019). The book has been awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand 2020 prize for most outstanding contribution to the … Read more
In the study of the topic “Perceptions of Environment”, two speakers will be invited every month in the Spring Semester 2021 at the seminar. The first chapter of the seminar is focused on India but not limited to it. Speakers are early career graduates, Postdocs and final stage PhD students, who are willing to present … Read more
Last week, the Riverine Rights team held its kickoff workshop. It included sessions on the individual country cases, on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, and allowed for discussions and planning of approaches, case studies and fieldwork. The workshop was originally planned to be held in New Zealand, but the Corona virus made that impossible. Instead, the meeting … Read more
‘The Symposium Collection on Indigenous Water Rights in Comparative Law’ compiled by Riverine Rights researcher Elizabeth Macpherson has now been published in Transnational Environmental Law. Here is the link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transnational-environmental-law/latest-issue
Interview with project leader Axel Borchgrevink on oslomet.no https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/featured-research/should-rivers-granted-same-rights-humans
Our NZ country lead, Dr Elizabeth Macpherson, gave the presentation ‘A New Zealand Perspective on an Ecological Constitution and the Rights of Nature in Chile’ as part of a webinar arranged by environmental NGO FIMA and the University of Chile on the need for better protection of environmental/natures rights in Chile’s constitutional reform process. You … Read more
Dr. Rahul Ranjan has been hired as a post-doctoral fellow on the project. Rahul is a political anthropologist from India, who recently completed his PhD at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in March this year in a record time of three years. His first day of work for the project – and … Read more
July 1st marked the formal start of this research project. It will explore the consequences of the recognition of rivers as legal persons in countries as different as New Zealand, India and Colombia. It involves six researchers, from the three case countries as well as from Norway and the UK, with backgrounds from the social … Read more