Rivers and Rights was founded in Thailand focusing on the intensified rare earth and critical minerals extraction – as a community rights issue with acute environmental, water, land, health, gender and reproductive justice aspects due to the contamination of soil and water with heavy metals, as an existential transboundary environmental crisis due to the contamination of transboundary watersheds traversing the entirety of the Mekong region, and as a deeply geopolitical issue, recognizing the vested interests of powerful states, the corporate defense industry, companies involved in digital tech and manufacturing renewable energy components and international financial institutions. They are also engaged in advocacy related to the development of destructive hydropower dams, being advanced in the name of ‘green energy’, which is leading to massive dispossession of river-dependent communities across the region, including through administrative court challenges in Thailand and bringing pressure on investors. Their work encompasses advocacy related to collective economic livelihood rights of communities, social rights (e.g. to health, housing, water, healthy environment, reproductive and intergenerational justice) and cultural rights (threatened by pressures to give up ways of living, dependent on rivers as sacred commons now contaminated with discharges from mining operations, for example).
While remaining grounded in the realities of affected communities, through working alongside community leaders undertaking to document social and environmental impacts and collectively organizing public advocacy events, Rights and Rivers also sees the connection with the massive expansion of military industries, ASEAN and bilateral trade partnerships on mining and mega-energy corridors, investments, technical assistance and loans from multilateral development banks and pressures from corporate conglomerates involved in the digital tech, data center and renewable battery industries.
Currently their focus is largely on the Mekong region in Thailand. They are working towards expanding their scope to work collaboratively on similar issues in other countries, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
