River imaginaries and climate change adaptation

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 are managed. We invite river-experts, river-managers and river-researchers for an open discussion to understand how different river imaginaries shape river management under climate change. We build our understanding of river imaginaries on the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and hydrosocial territories, as this allows us to include control and power dynamics in a set space. River imaginaries are therefore described as ‘the wished-for patterns regarding rivers and riparian zones, held by diverse epistemic communities’. The goal of the session is to discuss and enrich our understanding of how rivers are perceived, known and (thus) managed while discussing how river imaginaries have ‘travelled’ in several geographies going beyond North and South dichotomies.

The session format is twofold. We kick off this session with an introduction of river imaginaries in India and Colombia after which we facilitate an exploratory discussion. We virtually travel the world and invite participants to share river imaginaries. In the subsequent session, we present more detailed case study examples in Asia, Europe and South-America. Based on the examples, we reflect on the imaginaries found by using four archetypes: rivers as eco societies, rivers as territories, rivers as subjects and rivers as movements. We intend to jointly explore whether any of these lenses provide useful archetypes to deepen our understanding of how rivers can be known under multiple interpretations of reality.