New Treatied Spaces

Tackling the World’s Freshwater Crisis: Testing Legal Personhood, Treaty and Indigenous Paradigms

This project will address the world’s freshwater access crisis and its associated threats to well-being by analyzing three legal solution sets: 1) the ‘legal personhood’ and ‘rights of nature’ paradigm 2) the treaty and interjurisdictional and transboundary agreement paradigm and 3) Indigenous approaches to relational water governance as advanced in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South America, including Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

It will map the tension between ‘legal personhood and ‘rights of nature’ concepts versus Western legal doctrine and established property law, evaluate the case for treaties as the optimal method for securing transboundary co-operation and ongoing freshwater access, and analyze the data and discourse surrounding the application of Indigenous governance systems and both ‘legal personhood’ and treaty strategies to assure freshwater access. The result will be the first trans-jurisdictional, interdisciplinary solution-oriented study of both theoretical and applied Indigenous strategies for solving the world’s freshwater crisis.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash