Bioregional relationship governance

The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers.

In an essay of 5 October 2026, Indy Johar argues against treating a bioregion as a bigger, more ecological territory with a new boundary. A boundary, however well drawn, still creates an inside and an outside and lets consequences be pushed across the line. He proposes instead that a bioregion is made of bindings, relationships in which one party's condition affects another's viability, and knots, places where many bindings shape each other: a farm, a town, a water system. His example is a water knot, which includes soils, vegetation, groundwater, settlements, extraction infrastructure and the institutions governing them, and may reach upstream well beyond a catchment.

The governance consequence is that institutions would hold obligations across knots, assembling commitments among those whose actions jointly determine a condition of life, with responsibility apportioned by causal contribution, exposure, benefit and capacity to respond, and with standing given to lives that depend on the system but cannot make a claim. Investment would be judged by its effect on the knots a site depends on, through something like a bioregional financing facility. Maps of these bindings are expected to stay revisable, with sensing and machine assistance helping alongside local knowledge.

A related strand is the rights-of-nature movement. A 2023 WWNO report describes Black and Indigenous organisers across the Mississippi basin seeking legal standing for the river, following recognition of the rights of nature in Ecuador's 2008 constitution, municipal ordinances in the United States, and cases brought on behalf of wild rice in Minnesota and salmon in Washington; experts quoted there note that a river crossing many states and tribal lands would be hard to give standing in court.

Status: a proposal and interpretive framework, not a system or a tool.