The Legal Personhood of the Rhone

Photo : Rhone River (via Unsplash)

PhD researcher Cyrille Vallet of the GEDT, Prof. Christian Bréthaut, and Michel Lussault of the École normale supérieure de Lyon have recently published an article on The Legal Personhood as an Instrumental Tool for Reforming the Governance of the Rhône River on the academic journal Water.

Legal personhood has been recognised for several ecosystems worldwide, garnering significant attention from the scholarly community. This attention translated with the mobilisation of approaches anchored into legal, institutional, or ethnographic perspectives. Ongoing calls for the recognition of Rhone River’s legal personhood provides us the opportunity to analyse current 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, the authors 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. They 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 decentralised 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 instrumentalised;
3. the discussion remains limited to a small number of experts;
4. the legitimacy of this debate requires scrutiny; and,
5. the legal personhood concept should be reinterpreted to fit within Western ontologies.

The research is the result of a partnership between the Agence de l’eau RMC, IAGF, Index-Project, the UNESCO Chair in Hydropolitics at the University of Geneva and the École Urbaine de Lyon (LabEx IMU) at the University of Lyon.

Résumé en français : cet article s’intéresse à la manière dont la personnalité juridique des rivières est promue et entend s’imposer dans l’agenda politique, en examinant deux promoteurs actuels de la personnalité juridique du Rhône : la Commission internationale pour la protection du lac Léman (CIPEL) et ID-Eau. Les auteurs identifient cinq leçons clés.