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Interview with WRM Professor Rutgerd Boelens: on expert knowledge, power and decolonization
In a recent article published on the online platform Vice Versa, WRM Prof. Rutgerd Boelens and Dr. Nitin Rai reflect on how knowledge production often continues to be dominated by Western, colonial ideas that impede just and diverse development.
Worldwide, water management is infused with western, colonial concepts that dominate other visions. [...] The unspoken idea behind much scientific research and behind many development interventions is that non-Western societies have a lower form of civilization and that progress can be made through modernization and a break with the past.
In the recently started projects Riverhood and River Commons, Boelens and his colleagues aim to explore new ways of knowledge production about rivers: transdisciplinary, grassroots and cross-cultural. Together with local residents, activist and phd researchers, Prof. Rugerd Boelens will work on how to co-create and decolonize knowledge about water management and thinking about rivers.
A Western way of thinking is that rivers should be channeled and controlled. And even if nature is given space, as in the Netherlands with the Room for the River project , it is often the qualified experts who are in charge and not the residents and users around the river, or the river itself. In other parts of the world there are very different views, such as the idea that the river itself has rights.
Read more about the interesting reflections by Boelens and Rai in the article on Vice Versa (in Dutch).
See a related interesting read from Prof. Rutgerd Boelens on the 'Riverhood' and the politics of (mis)recognizing local water cultures and water rights systems (in English).