Use ecological personhood as a strategy

A revolutionary concept has emerged in environmental law in recent years: granting legal personhood to rivers.

The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers captures this shift, naming core rights – the right to flow, perform essential ecosystem functions, be free from pollution, sustain native biodiversity, regenerate and maintain connectivity – so rivers are recognised not as resources, but as living entities with inherent rights.

Granting legal rights means a river can be represented in court. It also involves appointing guardians to speak on the river’s behalf.

International precedents include New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) settlement, which was the first in the world to grant a river legal personhood, recognising it as an indivisible living whole with appointed guardians.

The Atrato River in Colombia and Canada’s Magpie River (Muteshekau-shipu) have also been granted rights, while Bangladesh’s courts have extended legal personhood to all rivers.

In the UK, there is no national statute on personhood. But several councils have endorsed charters granting “personhood” rights to 10 rivers – an institutional signal of what may come.

For museums, these shifts intersect with ethics, indigenous knowledge and public education: collections and programmes increasingly operate as civic forums where environmental rights can be debated and modelled.

Our MA Curating Contemporary Design project – River Rights: Guardians for the Hogsmill – unfolded in two acts.

In 2024, Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery, which is on a small island on the Hogsmill river (which runs through Greater London and Surrey) hosted a curated dinner that featured a recycled-denim river runner down the table, UV-lit headlines about river crises and a symbolic menu that translated legal language into sensory cues.

Guests became stakeholders by tying ribbons to the runner to pledge their “guardian” commitments.

In April, we translated the dinner into a living-archive exhibition at Kingston School of Art’s Platform Gallery.

The headline wall returned; the denim runner reappeared as a repository of public pledges; and photographs and script fragments shaped visitors’ understanding of river rights as both legal principle and community practice.

Three practical lessons emerged.

First, design can de-abstract law. Bitterness in a green drink stands in for pollution; the denim river maps connectivity; UV headlines stage urgency. The aim isn’t spectacle but translation – moving ideas from courtrooms into our rooms. 

Similarly, Nottingham Contemporary’s 2015 Rights of Nature exhibition and the Serpentine’s General Ecology/Back to Earth programmes show how sustained, design-led approaches can support complex environmental thought.

Second, participation builds mandate. Bringing guardians, campaigners, lawyers and students together – then archiving their voices and pledges – created continuity between the event, exhibition and ongoing advocacy.

Comparable models exist beyond art museums; activist-museum initiatives, such as the Natural History Museum (Not An Alternative), treat the museum as an organising tool for environmental justice while maintaining curatorial integrity.

Third, it is important to be precise about the law while embracing civic ambition. In the UK, personhood remains local (charters, motions) rather than national. Programming should clarify this while still leaving room to imagine future frameworks.

Practical steps include: partnering with river groups and researchers; treating participatory artefacts (pledges, testimonies) as exhibits; using multisensory interpretation to stage legal ideas; and planning longitudinally, so events and exhibitions circulate across platforms. 

In short, see ecological personhood not only as a legal innovation but as a curatorial strategy – one that helps institutions move from representing environmental change to convening publics that can act on it. 

Marçal Prats is a London-based designer and curator