Researching river personhood: Making the case for relational research methods
The concept of legal personhood offers compelling ways to rethink water use and governance—but researching it comes with risks.
Across the world, researchers, activists, funders, and even governments are exploring how the law can recognize rivers as living beings and legal persons. Unsurprisingly, research on the use of legal personhood as part of natural resource governance is trending: if you type “legal personhood nature” into Google Scholar, it will return some 247,000 results.
The conceptual appeal of a river as a legal person emerges from a combination of cultural fit, strategic leverage, and poetic licence.
The conceptual appeal of a river as a legal person emerges from a combination of cultural fit, strategic leverage, and poetic licence. The promising legal pathways offered by river personhood for moving away from extractive and unsustainable approaches to natural resource governance are well documented, perhaps none more so than the Whanganui River person (Te Awa Tupua), recognized by law in 2017. In many cases, Indigenous and local communities seeking to exercise control over water use and governance have secured the legal recognition of rivers through long-standing and ongoing political activism and legal strategy. These models also emerge from distinct (and diverse) understandings of the relationships between people and natural entities, considered living and related beings or ancestors, under the care of local peoples.
The challenges of legal personhood research
The world’s fascination with legal personhood makes sense, and the desire to research established examples like the Whanganui River as models for comparative situations is understandable. But the work of researchers who have no direct connection to the places and legal persons they study poses a range of methodological and ethical risks. And this disconnect is common: most researchers on legal personhood are non-Indigenous scholars from the Global North and most exemplars of legal personhood are based in Indigenous and local communities in the Global South. Research on legal personhood does not occur within a vacuum. Those of us in the Global North work within a well-established set of modernist assumptions about what counts as knowledge and who is entitled to produce and verify it. We are mindful that the study of Indigenous peoples by outsiders has a violent and extractive history, and as Linda Tuhiwai Smith warns, “the word ‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary.”
Despite the risks of researching legal personhood, we believe that this work can be immensely beneficial both to the researcher and to the legal and political strategies of the affected communities—if carried out in a thoughtful and ethical manner. Here we draw on our experiences and provide our four top tips for researchers of river personhood.
Study yourself first
Research on legal personhood does not occur within a vacuum.
Researchers can start by accepting that they are not objective arbiters of the truth. They can contribute more valuable scholarship by reflecting on and confronting their own history and context than by evaluating non-Western legal models according to Western or Eurocentric values, methods, and criteria. We desperately need more research on the potential for legal personhood to improve water governance in the Global North, and there is an ample history of connection to and reverence for nature in the ancient cultures of Europe. In studying their own local context, researchers can draw on deep-level understanding of local legal systems and languages. Such a model significantly lowers the risk of engaging in “parachute research” and provides an opportunity for researchers to build long-term, reciprocal relationships with the communities affected by their research.
Minimize your burden
The labor of engaging with researchers—even those who seek to engage ethically with the communities they study—is a growing burden on Indigenous communities in many parts of the world. Before adding to that burden, researchers can step back and ask: is my voice needed in this space? Researchers may elect to amplify Indigenous voices or rely on secondary sources (crucially, critically reassessed to avoid reproducing disrespect or existing inaccuracies) rather than conducting their own interviews. They might also coordinate with researchers already in the field to avoid the unnecessary duplication of work.
Respect sovereignty
Indigenous people have a right to sovereignty over data about them, their lands, and their resources. Researchers working with river communities should seek permission with humility and follow local research protocols. Many Indigenous communities have processes for seeking approval for research, conducting research, and sharing its benefits with those who choose to share their knowledge. Depending on the cultural context, it may be necessary to obtain the consent of or accord authorship to the more-than-human beings caught up in the project.
Undertaking research on a river is not a transaction—it enables an intergenerational relationship of trust between the researcher, their family, the community, and the river itself.
Practice relational research
Relational models of river personhood, like the Whanganui River’s, adopt an understanding drawn from Indigenous law. According to the Tupua te Kawa, or “the intrinsic values that represent the essence of Te Awa Tupua,” people and the river exist in an ancestral relationship, entailing mutually reinforcing obligations of care across generations. Te Reo Māori expresses this as, “Nō te kawa ora a ‘Tupua te Kawa’ hei taura here nā Te Awa Tupua me ōna tāngata ki te kawa nō tawhito rangi,” meaning “the natural law and value system of Te Awa Tupua, which binds the people to the River and the River to the people.” These Tupua te Kawa provide a framework not just for governing the Whanganui River but also for doing research with it ethically. Researchers in other river communities can be guided by the laws, norms, and protocols of those rivers as an ethical framework for their conduct. Undertaking research on a river is not a transaction—it enables an intergenerational relationship of trust between the researcher, their family, the community, and the river itself.
The path forward
Taking the relational route to researching legal personhood is not the easy option, and the authors acknowledge that we, too, have gotten it wrong in the past. But critical self-reflection, learning from mistakes, and a commitment to slow collaboration based on reciprocal relationship-building with rivers and their related communities can help maintain integrity in research endeavors. It makes sense that those researching relational governance models should apply that same standard of relationality to their own research engagement. Although this takes time and care, the resulting research is infinitely more enlightening, impactful, and satisfying.
