Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the maintenance of risk discourses in relation to flood events and how the perceived risks of flooding legitimize certain ways of engineering rivers. The aim is to challenge hegemonic understandings of river management, and to highlight human entanglements with water bodies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the creation and maintenance of risk discourses in relation to river management practices, and in particular flood events. Flood events are commonly emphasized in order to amplify the dangers of the untamed nature; they are often regarded as imposed on humans (rather than by humans) and subsequently turn rivers into objects of extensive engineering. Rivers then, are socio-environmental systems (Pritchard 2011) in that they are subjected to human cultivation, most often in terms of regulation and control. Regulatory practices and instances of control nonetheless respond to (the thought of) certain risks and threats (rather than others), and as such, they serve as stepping stones for political, national and economic interests (for example, see Boelens and Dávila 1998; Swyngedouw 2004; Kaika 2005; Pritchard 2011; Trombley 2018). These practices are thus part of the politics of water, where nature emerges as “the universal appendage of capital” (Smith [1984] 2010, 155), highly invested in the logic of production and accumulation.

Investigating the creation and maintenance of risk discourses in relation to flood events, the aim of this paper is twofold: a) to challenge current, hegemonic understandings of river management, which largely build on regulation and control, and b) to initiate discussions concerning human entanglements with water bodies and other, non-humans in times of flooding. Taken together, these two aims initiate alternative ways of thinking about river management as they speak to possibilities of adapting to the actuality of rivers, as well as retreating from their course.