The river as subject: legal innovations and their consequence for rights and development

Rivers have been granted rights as legal subjects or legal persons in diverse settings across the world in recent years. In this short chapter I aim to explore the claims regarding the development implications of riverine rights. I their potential to transcend seemingly ineffective regulatory frameworks for rivers and “reveal potential paths towards transformative change”. However, with reference to the ruling on the Atrato River, a key case of recent Riverine jurisprudence, I question whether rulings are fit to address the problems they intend. Rather than a panacea for all problems of rights, governance, and development, I propose that the Atrato case is telling of the difficulty of legal rights of rivers cases to overcome embedded structures of power, violence, and existing patterns of resource exploitation. The chapter suggests that, whilst each case of river rights recognition needs to be studied in context, the Atrato case is suggestive of patterns in political ecology and development that can be found elsewhere. The river as subject inspires important legal conversations regarding nature-human relations, but the possible impact of this legal innovation on development is intertwined and reliant on pre-existing politics and power relations. Emphasizing the difficulty of legal innovation in a context of contested authority the chapter speaks to one of the wider themes of this volume i.e., the contradictions and tensions that exist between the preservation of nature and continued patterns of political and economic development.