The “Towards a Loire Parliament” initiative is a situated research-action experiment and an operative institutional fiction aimed at reconfiguring relationships between human societies, the Loire River (France), and living environments. Initiated in 2019 by POLAU (Arts & Urbanism Hub), the initiative lies at the intersection of arts, humanities, environmental sciences, and territorial practices, exploring renewed forms of ecological governance and democratic engagement in the 21st century, particularly in riverine contexts marked by environmental uncertainty.

Based on the hypothesis of an assembly capable of representing not only human collectives but also more-than-human entities of the Loire basin—waters, sediments, species, and ecological dynamics—the project challenges anthropocentric frameworks of law, politics, and spatial planning. Rather than proposing a fixed institutional model, it unfolds as an open and evolving process that embraces uncertainty, plurality of knowledge, and situated inquiry as methodological principles. It mobilizes a heterogeneous coalition of actors—researchers, artists, jurists, naturalists, public institutions, citizen associations, and river users—engaged in the co-production of knowledge and narratives from within the milieu itself.

The Loire Parliament initiative is rooted in a long history of environmental mobilizations along the Loire (including Loire Vivante, etc.), while reformulating these struggles in light of contemporary ecological debates on the political recognition of non-human entities. The initiative was initially structured through a cycle of public hearings (2019–2021), conceived as an expanded parliamentary inquiry bringing together philosophers, anthropologists, ecologists, jurists, artists, and river practitioners, with contributions from scholars such as Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola. These hearings, extended through artistic and editorial outputs (“Le fleuve qui voulait écrire », De Toledo, 2021), highlighted both the heuristic potential of institutional fiction and its operational limits, including heterogeneous temporalities, coordination challenges, and ambiguities surrounding representation. This approach being at odds with the approach centered on the “voices” of the river.

The latter refers to a set of listening devices, sensitive mediations, embodied experiences, and narrative translations seeking to make perceptible the perspectives of the river and its ecosystems. In this sense, taking into account the voices of the Loire, what we perceive of them, must be able to guide the projects carried out by the collective. Since 2022, the collective has deliberately prioritized this dimension, emphasizing territorial anchoring and experimental protocols of attention to the living milieu.

Today, the Loire Parliament functions as a collective learning laboratory based on a distinctive protocol combining: (1) the initiation of inquiries into territorial issues (bathing, pollution, ecological solidarities); (2) systematic immersions in the river environment (walks, bivouacs, navigation); (3) arts–sciences experiments to cross perspectives and expand imaginaries; and (4) public assemblies and the production of material and immaterial traces (sensitive maps, narratives, films, podcasts, archives). Far from institutional closure, the initiative seeks to build a shared yet plural narrative capable of transforming how societies think, feel, and govern from watershed perspectives.

This paper assesses the epistemological, political, and methodological implications of this arts–sciences–territories dynamic, arguing that the Loire Parliament contributes to environmental humanities by experimenting with (in)frastructures of engagement, collective inquiry tools, and situated knowledge circulation in times of accelerated ecological change.