The findings highlight that while legal recognition represents an important step, its transformative potential depends on broader political, institutional and epistemic conditions:

1. Legal recognition is a starting point, not a solution.
Granting legal personhood to rivers introduces a significant normative shift but does not in itself ensure implementation or desired ecological outcomes. In both cases, a persistent gap remains between juridical recognition and its translation into enforceable actions and measurable environmental improvements.

2. Community agency and guardianship are critical.
Inclusive and representative guardianship arrangements are central to translating rights into practice. The Colombian case shows that collective community participation can strengthen legitimacy and continuity of governance processes, while its absence, as in Bangladesh, constrains meaningful implementation.

3. Including different forms of knowledge determines transformative potential.
Implementation of the rights of rivers is not only a legal or institutional challenge but also an epistemic one. Where governance systems fail to integrate local and relational knowledge, rights remain abstract and difficult to operationalize. In contrast, in Colombia, the partial inclusion of biocultural knowledge, which links ecological processes with the cultural practices, values and livelihoods of local communities, demonstrates pathways toward more grounded and context-sensitive governance.

4. Governance arrangements shape outcomes.
The effectiveness of rights of rivers depends on governance design. Fragmented institutional mandates, unclear coordination mechanisms, and weak enforcement capacities limit implementation. Where governance remains misaligned across sectors and scales, legal recognition risks adding complexity without improving outcomes.

5. Structural conditions constrain transformation.
The implementation of rights of rivers unfolds within existing governance systems shaped by historical and colonial legacies, anthropocentric paradigms and institutional fragmentation. Without deliberate efforts to address these structural constraints, the legal recognition of rivers as rights-bearing entities risks remaining a symbolic framework rather than becoming a transformative one.