Presentation short abstract

This presentation will examine how the emergence of a cross-border territory as a commons can facilitate environmental care. Focusing on a citizen experiment with law, it explores how welfare can be conceived as more-than-human in the context of caring for a transboundary river basin.

Presentation long abstract

Water flows and binds. As it moves, it cuts across boundaries and travels from one body to another. Water connects humans with the more-than-human. As it leaves and enters bodies of all kinds, water facilitates our thinking about how we are in common, how we come together as transboundary hydrocommunities joined by a shared substance, without renouncing our incommensurability and our irreducible plurality. Drawing on literature encouraging us to ‘think with water’, this paper discusses how international river basins, cutting across geopolitical, species, ethnic, and ideological boundaries, constitute potential devices to facilitate environmental care by eliciting imaginaries of commons. I ethnographically explore a citizen experiment with law in Central America that conceived one of the region’s largest transboundary river basins as a commons to promote its care. Beginning in the mid-2000s, this process resulted in a prototype of a transboundary treaty for the management of international waters in 2015. This experiment conjured the transboundary territory of the river basin as a hydrocommunity, bound by its watery connections and comprising the peoples, biodiversity and territories of three contiguous nations that were part of a single polity from precolonial times through to the early years of the postcolonial period. In making a territory visible, the transboundary basin has enabled proposals for how to care for it that place the welfare of water on an equal footing with human welfare.