The hydro-politics of rehabilitating fish migration: The Dutch Haringvliet storm surge barrier

Flood barriers impede fish mobility, so one would expect environmentalists to welcome the current vogue for dam decommissioning and dam removal. Dam removal, however, may also contend with strong stakeholder dissent and opposition. Influential community members may have developed a stake in the infrastructure’s functioning and rally behind keeping it in place. Drawing on Yong’s (2021) application of Cresswell’s politics of mobility applied to fish and flood infrastructure, this article applies a fish mobilities framework to a European case of multilevel conflict: the partial opening of the Haringvliet flood barrier on the Dutch coast to restore tidal dynamics in the Rhine-Meuse estuary. It charts how a very local bottleneck could hold up the implementation of basin-level fish migration policy for 19 years. Based on literature review and interviews with key stakeholders, it is found that in the tussle over the (re)opening of the Haringvliet sluicegates, environmental, water quality and navigation interests) backgrounded the interests of migratory fish and fishers for most of the stand-off’s course. This negates that the return of migratory fish to the Rhine was the main (symbolic) driver for the intervention in the first place. Now that their passageway has been partly re-enabled, it turns out fish migration is not as predicable and controllable as believed; given the choice, migratory fish migrate as they please.