What’s wrong with healthy rivers? Promise and practice in the search for a guiding ideal for freshwater management

Abstract

It is easy to talk of improving river condition. It is more difficult to pin down exactly what this means. Emerging from ecology, the concept of river health presented an attempt to provide a broad framework for freshwater management incorporating both natural and human values. Initially criticised as subjective and unscientific, river health was nevertheless mainstreamed through being rendered quantifiable. Tracing the (re)definition of river health from a holistic but hazy ethic of environmental care to prescriptive indicators for intervention, I examine how common-sense understandings of river condition were first challenged by, and then incorporated within, the scholarly and political project of river health. Arguing that the search for objectivity entrenched assumptions that naturalness was both desirable and attainable, I explore the potential value of a reimagined, revitalised river health as a constructive platform for renegotiating and broadening what matters for freshwater.