The Politics of Riverine Rights: Environmental Struggles in Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia and India

This edited collection explores the concept of riverine rights in relation to rivers in New Zealand, Colombia and India that have been declared legal persons or subjects of rights. For academics and researchers across social sciences and law with an interest in social struggles, environmental justice and innovative legislation.

Axel Borchgrevink is Professor of Development Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oslo. He has done research in Latin America, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and New Zealand, and worked with issues of rural development and resource politics, civil society and indigenous rights, and development aid. He is the author of Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community and has also co-edited the book Contested Powers: The Politics of Energy and Development in Latin America. He is the project leader of Riverine Rights: Exploring the Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Rights of Rivers.

Malene K. Brandshaug is a postdoctoral fellow at Department of International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway, and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Global Studies at University of Gothenburg (2020), Sweden. Her decade-long ethnographic specialisation in water and Peru, is amplified by her recent work on human-water relations and environmental activism in Norway, and on international currents regarding Rights of Rivers. She is currently working on her postdoctoral project Rights of Waters: An Ethnographic Study of Human-Environment Relations and Local Mobilisation in Norway, and is a member of the research project Riverine Rights: Exploring the Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Rights of Rivers.