REvive · Towards river restoration conviviality

Nature and river restoration are high on the political agendas; the EU Biodiversity Strategy and Nature Restoration Law stipulate ambitious goals. However, in practice, river restoration projects – including barrier removal, implementation of ecological baseflows, and others – are contested. Different human and nonhuman actors have diverging ideas about what the future of rivers should look like. Underlying are multiple ontologies about what rivers are, can and should be; and epistemologies that define how rivers can be known. Through innovatively analysing river restoration as a political and contentious encounter of multiple ontologies and epistemologies, this project goes beyond the state-of-the art. Based on the study of restoration initiatives in three rivers in Spain, the project will generate new interdisciplinary knowledge about the complexities of river restoration. Rigorous and critical academic analysis will be combined with the exploration of pathways for constructive engagement: with local actors, the project will organize restoration design labs to develop methodologies for co-designing just and robust river conviviality. The project goes beyond mainstream formats of multi-stakeholder platforms through a focus on the ‘politics of design’ and ‘design justice’ that includes humans and nonhumans alike. This is a highly ambitious undertaking, which is made feasible through a careful methodological and conceptual set-up. The placement at the University of Girona and the secondment at the University of Twente will allow the researcher to develop a wide range of knowledges and professional skills; while she will use the project results and her expertise to stimulate transdisciplinary and critical debate in academia and practice. The non-academic placement with the Catalan Water Agency allows to make the generated scientific knowledge actionable and vice versa, to let action inform continuous knowledge production about just river restoration.