Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This research explores how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies, particularly the emerging Rights of Nature, reframe relational ontologies, reciprocal relationships, and governance of intermittent river ecosystems.

Paper long abstract

This research conceptualises rivers as living entities with rights that shape human and more-than-human lives. It explores how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies, particularly the emerging ecocentric approach, such as the Rights of Nature, reframe relational ontologies, reciprocal relationships, and governance of intermittent river ecosystems. The research draws on ethnographic fieldwork along the Kanakarayan Aru and Malwathu Oya river basins in Sri Lanka. The riverine communities reveal that rivers’ flows intersect with local livelihoods, irrigation infrastructure, development, and traditional and modern governance. Kanakarayan Aru is the site of ongoing political contestation over water from the Iranaimadu reservoir between communities in Jaffna and farmers in Kilinochchi. These highlight uncertainties surrounding Kilinochchi farmers’ customary water rights and reflect broader injustices and inequalities in water access and livelihood security. Similarly, the lower Malwathu Oya project illustrates how state-led irrigation and settlement schemes entangle questions of land rights, demographic change, and political objectives under the guise of water management. This research thus argues that rivers are both living ecologies and political-legal actors where rights, responsibilities, and social relations are continuously interdependent by attending to fluvial ecologies, river imaginaries, relational ethics, and governance. Rights-based and relational approaches to river governance reveal how ecology, society and law are inseparably intertwined, offering new pathways for ecocentric governance. This research demonstrates how environmental legal geographies and legal ecologies could elucidate new avenues for challenging binaries between nature and society, and for recognising nature’s rights, ethics, governance, and ecological justice within emerging fluvial ecological landscapes.