River Commoning and the State: A Cross?Country Analysis of River Defense Collectives

Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in last three decades. Some of most emblematic are anti-dam anti-mining movements been framed, by large, as civil society versus state movements. In this article, we bring nuance such framings analyzing broader diverse river-commoning state–citizens relations underlie them. To study these build on notions communality, grassroots scalar politics, rooted water collectives, justice movements, which use analyze several collective practices, initiatives, protect Thailand, Spain, Ecuador, Mozambique. The analysis cases shows myriad ways river collectives engage with different manifestations at multiple scales. As show, while some strategically remain unnoticed, others actively seek create spaces engagement like-minded citizen supportive non-governmental organizations, actors. Through relations, alliances made political space is sought advance commoning initiatives. This leads a variety context-specific multi-scalar processes governance arenas.