Contribution short abstract:

Based on fieldwork on river biodiversity restoration projects in Latvia, I explore the competing rationales used to promote the balance between flows friendly to aquatic and riverside life as well as the economy. In these struggles, river politics remain hard to pose in forms beyond extraction.

Contribution long abstract:

In the last decades, there have emerged increasing efforts to remove previously built obstacles to the free flow of rivers. These range from the removal of hydroelectric power plants to restoring meanders and floodplain areas to straightened rivers. These projects of re-engineering and unwriting of modern damages to the environment are often aimed at restoring biodiversity. Nevertheless, restoration of fish populations, constructed wetlands for pollution control, and creation of floodplain meadows are not entirely free from fractions of extractivist thinking. Based on fieldwork on projects that aim to restore the flow of waters in Latvia, in this paper I explore what competing rationales are used to promote the restoration of flows that are friendly to aquatic and riverside life. I show how current frames of infrastructuring for biodiversity compete with other modes of extracting value from ‘nature’. Through the politicisation of flows, restoration projects often end up promoting biodiversity friendly extraction, which is seen as an important step in the process of decreasing environmental losses. While many experts hold ecocentric views on the need to preserve and foster biodiversity, in political struggles they are often used modestly. Thus, while the free-flowing river movement gains it’s traction, river politics do not easily go beyond narratives of extraction. While showing the political stakes of different approaches in biodiversity-supporting river politics, with the paper I also open up to discussion this modesty in drawing on alternative narratives of development and multispecies flourishing in rivers.