Rivers Have Rights

Description

Since 2017, the rights of rivers have increasingly entered mainstream environmental law, prompting a potentially radical transformation of rivers from resources into legal and living entities with whom humans are in relationships. In 2026, there were over 700 rights of nature initiatives in 67 countries, and almost 200 of these relate to freshwater ecosystems.

This is a rapidly growing field, but until now there has been little scholarly examination of how river rights are working in practice. This edited collection brings together scholars and practitioners to reflect on implementation experiences across a diverse array of rights for water bodies from around the globe to consider a range of questions, including:

• How is law giving effect to novel notions of personhood and what are the policy, legal, ecological and social opportunities and barriers to implementing rights of nature?
• How compatible are rights of nature with existing water governance approaches, including water markets and integrated water resource planning, and how are existing water laws responding to these new legal rights?
• What are the implications of rights of nature in practice for water justice and Indigenous rights?

In exploring these questions of how to implement river rights, this book also offers insights on how to transform our relationships with rivers in law and policy, along with new theoretical insights into the nature of legal personhood.