Keywords
River movement
River justice
Ecologies of care
Ecuador
How to Cite
Abstract
The San Pedro River Rescue Collective was born in 2021 as a citizen group whose goal is to restore the San Pedro River and its banks, which flow from the Illiniza volcano through Quito and its valleys towards the Pacific Ocean. One of the main dreams of its members is to bathe again in the river, as the past generation of their fathers and mothers did thirty years ago. The San Pedro River is facing multiple sources of contamination, from intensive cattle production at its watershed to wastewater and trash discharges in the city of Quito and Los Chillos valley, a densely populated area. From a political ecology perspective, this article examines the river imaginaries, knowledge co-creation and justice mobilized by the San Pedro River Rescue Collective as a river movement. The analysis is based on feminist epistemologies and ecologies of care mobilizing qualitative data gathered between January to April 2025. We explore how the San Pedro River Rescue Collective not only strives to revitalize a river, but to transform the relationship between society and nature at the very heart of the city. As a main result of this study, we conclude on the power of feelings and emotions to enact citizen action for the protection of urban rivers.
References
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Bin Abdullah, F. (2025). The legal recognition and protection of river rights: A growing movement. Earth Law Center.
Boelens, R. (2015). Water, Power and Identity: The Cultural Politics of Water in the Andes. Routledge.
Boelens, R., E. Shah, and B. Bruins. 2019. “Contested Knowledges: Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development.” Water 11 (3): 416.
Boelens, R., Escobar, A., Bakker, K., Hommes, L., Swyngedouw, E., Hogenboom, B., ... & Wantzen, K. M. (2022). Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1-32.
Cohen, J. B., Dannreuther, C., Fraundorfer, M., Mackie, C., Martin‐Ortega, J., Mdee, A., & Sutil, N. S. (2023). Riverkin: Seizing the moment to remake vital relations in the United Kingdom and beyond. People and Nature, 5(6), 1877-1892.
Constitución de la República del Ecuador. (2008). Artículo 71: Derechos de la naturaleza. https://www.asambleanacional.gob.ec/es/estructura/constitucion
Cusicanqui, S. (2010). Ch'ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Tinta limón.
De Luca Zuria, A. (2024) Overpopulation discourse: A feminist and necropolitical approach from the Global South. Geo: Geography and Environment, 0, e00144.
Dupuits, E., Puertas, C., & Intriago, M. (2024). Decolonizing Knowledge. Debates en Sociología, (59), 147-172.
Ehrnström-Fuentes, M. (2022). Organising in defence of life: The emergence and dynamics of a territorial movement in Southern Chile. Organization, 29(1), 155–177.
Elmhirst, R. (2015). Feminist political ecology. In The Routledge handbook of political ecology (pp. 519-530). Routledge.
EPMAPS (2024). Estrategia de descontaminación de los ríos de Quito.
Ergene, S., Banerjee, S. B., & Hofman, A. J. (2021). (Un) Sustainability and organization studies: Towards a radical engagement. Organization Studies, 42(8), 1319–1335.
Escobar, A. (2008). Una ecología de la diferencia: Igualdad y conflicto en un mundo “glocalizado”. In La cultura, estrategia de cooperación al desarrollo: Girona, 21-24 de noviembre 2007 (p. 27). Documenta Universitaria.
Escobar, A. (2014). Sentipensar con la tierra (Vol. 1). Medellín: Ediciones Unaula.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
ESRAG. (2022). Minga Mundial por el Agua. Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group. https://esrag.org/
Goodwin, G. (2019). The problem and promise of coproduction: Politics, history, and autonomy. World Development, 122, 501-513.
Goodwin, G. (2021). Communal struggles for water through coproduction: Pandemic experiences in Highland Ecuador in historical perspective. Alternautas, 8(1).
Greene, N. (2011). The first successful case of the Rights of Nature implementation in Ecuador. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Available: http://therightsofnature. org/first-ron-case-ecuador.
Gudynas, E. (2011). Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow. Development, 54(4), 441–447.
Gudynas, E. (2016). La naturaleza como sujeto de derechos en América Latina. Global Ecology and Biodiversity, 25(3), 343-355.
Haraway, D. (2013). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1. In Women, science, and technology (pp. 455-472). Routledge.
Haraway, D. (2016). Antropoceno, capitaloceno, plantationoceno, chthuluceno: fazendo parentes. ClimaCom Cultura Científica, 3(5), 139-146.
Hidalgo, J. P., Boelens, R., & Vos, J. (2017). De-colonizing water. Dispossession, water insecurity, and Indigenous claims for resources, authority, and territory. Water History, 9(1), 67-85.
Houart, C. (2023). Engaging with Water and Rivers from a Multispecies Justice Perspective. Blue Papers, 2(1), 50–57.
International Rivers. (2023). Who We Are. https://www.internationalrivers.org/
Iza Arias, G y Zotaminga Tupiza, A. (2024). Evaluación de la calidad del agua del río San Pedro en los cantones Mejía, Rumiñahui y Quito, aplicando ICA-Dinius. Universidad Central del Ecuador. Disponible en: https://www.dspace.uce.edu.ec/handle/25000/35061
Kauffman, C. M. (2016). Grassroots global governance: Local watershed management experiments and the evolution of sustainable development. Oxford University Press.
Krøijer, S., & Rubow, C. (2022). Introduction: Enchanted ecologies and ethics of care. Environmental Humanities, 14(2), 375-384.
Pavlovich, K., & Roche, M. (2024). Organising Food Systems Through Ecologies of Care: A Relational Approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 193(3), 459-469.
Martinez-Alier, J., Temper, L., Del Bene, D., & Scheidel, A. (2016). Is there a global environmental justice movement?. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 731-755.
Martínez, C. (2020). “Derechos de la Naturaleza y conflictos ecológicos en Ecuador.” Revista Andina de Estudios Ambientales, 5(1), 97–110.
Merçon, J. (Ed.). (2021). Investigación transdisciplinaria e investigación-acción participativa: Conocimiento y acción para la transformación. CopIt-arXives y Red de Socioecosistemas y Sustentabilidad, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Conacyt). https://copitarxives.fisica.unam.mx
Molle, F., P. Mollinga, and P. Wester. 2009. “Hydraulic Bureaucracies and the Hydraulic Mission: Flows of Water, Flows of Power.” Water Alternatives 3 (2): 328–349.
McCully, P. (2001). Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. Zed Books.
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital.
RCN. (2023). River Cities Network: Urban Water and Basin Resilience. https://rivercities.net/
Santos, B. D. S. (2014). Más allá del pensamiento abismal: de las líneas globales a una ecología de saberes. Epistemologías del sur (perspectivas), 21-66.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2–3), 213–232.
Swyngedouw, E. (2015). Depoliticized environments and the promises of the Anthropocene. In The international handbook of political ecology (pp. 148-162). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
UN-Habitat. (2020). Urban River Restoration Guidelines. United Nations Human Settlements Programme.
Waterkeeper Alliance. (2023). Our Mission. https://waterkeeper.org/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Andrade, Anahi Machado, Valentina Troya, Emilie Dupuits