Enlivening riverhood through counter-mapping - Evoking the hydrocommons in India and Colombia

This paper examines how multi-actor grassroots river communities engaged in counter-mapping exercises along the Mula River in India and the Magdalena River in Colombia. These two cases are analysed through the fourfold onto-epistemological framework associated with the riverhood concept and further mobilized as hydrocommons . Water, embodied but simultaneously extending from the that intimate scale to the planetary through hydrological flows is elucidated through counter-mapping. Grounded in the fourfold framework of riverhood, these maps provide a counterpoint to the structural capitalist forces driving extractive industries, environmental degradation, and climate change. Thus, engaging and deepening the riverhood framework, this paper seeks to understand and promote counter-mapping as a tool to evoke hydrocommons but at the same time shape strategies and practices for generative and equitable future-oriented water governance. Thereby the paper will demonstrate how counter-maps connect river grassroots communities in making for place and offer the potential to bring about transformative shifts through dynamizing and maintaining hydrocommons. Conceptually, the paper shows how the four-fold riverhood framework is useful to empirically detail varied political and ontological dimensions of rivers, while methodologically, counter-mapping is offered as the means to explore possibilities for future-oriented water governance strategies to become more generative and equitable. Overall, the paper draws on the two case studies to address the following research question: How can counter-mapping elicit rivehood in ways that give rise to situated hydrocommons? The paper shows how practices of counter-mapping foster multi-actor and multi-scalar dialogue negotiating and making visible how rivers can be otherwise. The cases show how these practices have the potential to redress exploitation, contribute to the reversal of widespread river socio-ecological degradation and counter neoliberalizing moves towards enclosures.