de Jong, L.; Veldwisch, G.J.; Melsen, L.A.; Boelens, R. Making Rivers, Producing Futures: The Rise of an Eco-Modern River Imaginary in Dutch Climate Change Adaptation. Water2024, 16, 598.
de Jong, L.; Veldwisch, G.J.; Melsen, L.A.; Boelens, R. Making Rivers, Producing Futures: The Rise of an Eco-Modern River Imaginary in Dutch Climate Change Adaptation. Water 2024, 16, 598.
de Jong, L.; Veldwisch, G.J.; Melsen, L.A.; Boelens, R. Making Rivers, Producing Futures: The Rise of an Eco-Modern River Imaginary in Dutch Climate Change Adaptation. Water2024, 16, 598.
de Jong, L.; Veldwisch, G.J.; Melsen, L.A.; Boelens, R. Making Rivers, Producing Futures: The Rise of an Eco-Modern River Imaginary in Dutch Climate Change Adaptation. Water 2024, 16, 598.
Abstract
In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. Amongst others, river futures justify the way adaptation projects materialize in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, side-lining and delegitimizing alternative river futures. Currently, limited work is done to critically reflect on the power of river futures in the context of climate change adaptation. We conceptualized the power of river futures through river imaginaries: collectively performed and publicly envisioned reproductions of riverine socionatures, mobilized through truth claims of social life and social order. Through the Border Meuse project case study, a climate change adaptation project in a stretch of the river Meuse in the south of the Netherlands and a proclaimed success story of climate adaptation in Dutch water management, we elucidated how three river imaginaries: a modern river imaginary, a market-driven imaginary and an eco-centric river imaginary, merged and materialized as an eco-modern river imaginary. Importantly, not only the river futures merged, also their aligned truth regimes merged. To this end, we argue that George Orwell’s famous quote “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” can be extended to ‘Who controls the future, controls how we see and act in the present, and how we rediscover the past’.
Keywords
climate change adaptation; futures; river imaginary; water management; Border Meuse project
Subject
Social Sciences, Political Science
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
