The Legal Personhood as an Instrumental Tool for Reforming the Governance of the Rhône River

Article Article scientifique Article The Legal Personhood as an Instrumental Tool for Reforming the Governance of the Rhône River eng 2024-11-01 2024-11-01 author Vallet Cyrille François 0009-0002-1660-432X 978846 Département de géographie et environnement (SdS) (DEGEN) author Brethaut Christian 782830 Service enseignement, recherche, administratif et technique (SdS) (SCSPS) author Lussault Michel 636948 3131 10.3390/w16213131 2073-4441 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/16/21/3131 <p>Legal personhood has been recognized for several ecosystems worldwide, garnering significant attention from the scholarly community. This attention translated with the mobilization of approaches anchored into legal, institutional, or ethnographic perspectives. On-going calls for the recognition of Rhone River’s legal personhood provides us the opportunity to analyze on-going processes in a transboundary river located in the middle of Europe. This paper focuses on how such a concept gets promoted and intends to make its way on the political agenda. Specifically, we examine two current promoters of the legal personhood of the Rhone River: the International Commission for the Protection of Lake Geneva (CIPEL) and ID-Eau. We identify five key lessons: (1) the request for recognition of legal personhood derives from actors’ willingness to change current governance practices and to shift the productivist paradigm towards more decentralized and inclusive governance system; (2) legal personhood is presented as a solution to problems that have not yet been clearly framed nor identified, opening up thinking on how such concept may be instrumentalized; (3) the discussion remains limited to a small number of experts; (4) the legitimacy of this debate requires scrutiny; (5) the legal personhood concept should be reinterpreted to fit within Western ontologies.</p> Legal personhood Rights of nature River Rhône Governance Political agenda Dewey 910 Agence de l’eau RMC IAGF Index-Project UNESCO Chair on hydropolitics at University of Geneva Ecole Urbaine de Lyon (LabEx IMU) within the University of Lyon 120 Département de géographie et environnement T2 false Water 16 21 032b1c34-5439-46a3-b076-8fb1712c1121 Article (Published version) Public Article_scientifique_from_crossref.pdf 799266 application/pdf CC BY-4.0 8d46a09baefa5b9eea8098329e26f1144a7001a05466827b6e53c324015cc734 openAccess Faculté des sciences de la société / Département de géographie et environnement

Title	Published in	Access level	OA Policy	Year	Views	Downloads

The Legal Personhood as an Instrumental Tool for Reforming the Governance of the Rhône River	Water			2024	148	547

Archive ouverte UNIGE

Lussault, Michel