2026/01/27 by Maarten Loopmans, Kato Van Speybroeck · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration #Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies #Transboundary Water Resource Management
paper · doi:10.1080/09644016.2026.2620914
openalex publication_date 2026/01/27 · openalex created_date 2026/01/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
In environmental conflicts, the political involvement of non-human actors sits uneasily with classical procedures of human politics. The engagement of non-human actors is often conceived in de-sensitized, emotionless, juridical forms, as an ‘external factor’ imposing its rules as boundaries on the political process. In this paper, we conceive of more-than-human participation differently, as embodied, affective and stimulated by conflict. This opens up environmental politics to be a co-creative process of intersubjectivation in which non-human actors are actively involved with and through the learning bodies of human participants. We build this argument based on ethnographic vignettes centered on water conflicts in Brussels, Belgium and Valencia, Spain.