When Koen De Feyter asked his students to “start from the view from below,” he was not coining a slogan; he was building a method. Koen insisted that human rights become locally relevant—interpreted and practiced where people actually live, organize and struggle. That stance shaped my doctoral journey on Indigenous peoples’ rights and, years later, continues to guide our community-anchored work on water justice in Bolivia’s Katari River Basin. In this post, I reflect on how a participatory water-monitoring project with Aymara communities resonates with Koen’s core themes: localizing human rights, the right to development, and Indigenous peoples’ rights and on what it means, in practice, to treat evidence from below as a lever for justice.
From recognition to realization: the gap Koen taught us to see
Koen’s scholarship on localizing human rights argues that universal standards must be translated through local practices, institutions and meanings if they are to matter.[1] He also pushed debates on the right to development, highlighting mutual accountability and inclusive partnerships beyond narrow state-centric frames.[2] In his later role with the UN Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development, he emphasized that the right to development demands active, free and meaningful participation by those affected.[3]
Those three threads —localisation, participation, and shared accountability— frame the Indigenous citizen-science initiative reported in our study of the Katari River Basin (KRB). The KRB, which drains into Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian Altiplano, is a region heavily impacted by urban expansion, mining, and agricultural runoff, making it a critical site for community-driven water monitoring and governance. The project trained secondary-school students and community members to collect and interpret water-quality data using accessible tools to then situate those results within national standards and rights frameworks. In short: we tried to practice what Koen advocated for producing credible, community-owned evidence and opening pathways to voice and remedy. This initiative was conceived and implemented as a transdisciplinary research effort with and within the community, bringing together environmental engineering (through Drs. Ann van Griensven and Afnán Agramont of the Water and Climate Department, VUB), communication (Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, UCB), and law (myself), during 2024.
What the water says and why it matters for rights
Over four months (Mar–Jun 2024), participants collected 46 samples (38 passed quality control) across sites prioritized by the community near the KRB. Using a calibrated multiparameter probe and colorimetric tests, they measured pH, EC, TDS, salinity, nutrients (NO₂/NO₃/PO₄), and turbidity — a basic but transparent methodology well-suited for community settings. Results were then compared to Bolivia’s Reglamento en Materia de Contaminación Hídrica (1995) and discussed in workshops on environmental and Indigenous rights. These workshops were held at the Universidad Católica Boliviana (UCB) with the participation of Indigenous community members, environmental engineering and law students, and the research team, fostering mutual learning and co-interpretation of results in light of both scientific standards and rights frameworks. The core empirical picture is sobering: TDS, phosphate (PO₄), and turbidity repeatedly exceeded national thresholds.
These findings reflect systemic pollution linked to upstream mining legacies, urban effluents, industrial discharges and agricultural runoff; pressures that disproportionately burden downstream Aymara communities, affecting water, food systems and cultural continuity.
Citizen science as legal empowerment necessary but not sufficient
Interviews (n=20) reveal how hands-on monitoring increased environmental literacy and a sense of agency (“we can measure and compare”). Yet participants also perceived structural injustice: downstream communities face the harms; upstream actors and institutions hold power. While many expressed moral clarity about unfairness, only a minority recognized formal legal avenues or felt confident navigating them, which underscores the existence of a legal literacy gap. The project spurred conversations at home, classroom initiatives and small collective actions, but participants also reported frustration with limited institutional responsiveness, highlighting the enduring distance between data and remedy.
Koen’s lens helps interpret this tension. He warned that recognition without realisation produces disillusion. Localizing rights requires institutional pathways that validate community-generated knowledge, procedural justice that ensures participation and consultation, and shared accountability mechanisms that tie evidence to action.[4]
Intergenerational justice and the recovery of ecological memory
One powerful theme is intergenerational environmental injustice. Elders recall swimmable rivers and abundant fish; youth know pollution as the norm. The citizen-science process created a space where data, memory and rights could meet, reconnecting ecological memory and legitimizing local narratives often dismissed as “anecdotal.” This resonates with Koen’s insistence that context, culture and lived experience are not peripheral to rights, instead they are constitutive of how rights can be claimed, interpreted and enforced.
From evidence to governance: what would Koen ask us to do?
Importantly, legal literacy was not an afterthought: we already delivered rights-focused sessions that helped participants reframe contamination as a violation of their constitutional and environmental rights, not a matter of pity or bad luck, and identify concrete avenues for remedy.
If we read our Katari experience through Koen’s work, at least four actionable implications emerge:
- Institutionalise community data: Municipal and basin-level water authorities should adopt protocols to receive, validate and publish citizen-generated datasets alongside official monitoring—improving SDG 6.3.2 coverage and closing spatial/temporal gaps in poorer regions.
- Couple monitoring with legal literacy: Every monitoring cycle should be paired with workshops on constitutional/environmental/Indigenous rights and remedy pathways (administrative complaints, environmental oversight bodies, public interest litigation, Escazú procedural rights).
- Create accountability venues: Regular co-governance hearings where communities present evidence to duty-bearers (municipalities, utilities, industries) and agree on time-bound corrective plans, with public follow-up.
- Protect data sovereignty & continuity: Citizen science should be co-designed, with local custody of data, and long-term support (schools + universities + NGOs + basin agencies), so monitoring doesn’t die when a short grant ends.
A personal note
Koen supervised my doctoral work on Indigenous rights. He was rigorous in analysis and generous in judgment; he trusted people and led without imposing. In Antwerp, during a Law & Development Christmas dinner, Koen’s playful questions about our cultures ended with each of us receiving a recycled book—a small, eloquent fusion of sustainability and knowledge. He even mentioned Bolivian cuisine, making me feel instantly at home. That is how he practiced localisation: by making the global intimately human.
Carrying the method forward
Our Katari study suggests that citizen science can catalyze environmental awareness, intergenerational dialogue, and community action; but its transformative potential depends on whether institutions recognize, receive and act upon community evidence. That is precisely where Koen’s legacy speaks most loudly: human rights, and the right to development, must be done with people, not for them. The next step in Katari is to formalize interfaces between schools/communities, basin authorities and regulators, so that the view from below reshapes the decisions from above. In Koen’s spirit, there always remains one more book for us to write, and if we write it his way, it will be inspired by the communities and give voice to the voiceless.
[1] Koen De Feyter, ‘Localizing Human Rights’ <https://repository.uantwerpen.be/link/irua/97986> accessed 14 October 2025.
[2] Koen De Feyter, Towards a Framework Convention on the Right to Development (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Geneva 2013) <https://www.uitrustnz.org/Resources/Declaration%20on%20the%20Right%20to%20development/Towards%20a%20frame%20work%20on%20the%20right%20to%20Development.pdf> accessed 14 October 2025.
[3] ‘Statement by Mr. Koen De Feyter Vice-Chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development’ (OHCHR) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2021/11/statement-mr-koen-de-feyter-vice-chair-expert-mechanism-right> accessed 14 October 2025.
[4] De Feyter (n 1); De Feyter (n 2); ‘Statement by Mr. Koen De Feyter Vice-Chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development’ (n 3).