Interdisciplinary Critical Geographies of Water: Capturing the Mutual Shaping of Society and Hydrological Flows (original) (raw)
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Toward a Sociology of Water: Reconstructing the Missing "Big Picture" of Social Water Research
Water, 2024
In recent years, significant advancements have been made in the field of social water research. This is especially reflected in the emergence and consolidation of three influential theoretical approaches in hydrology, human geography, and anthropology: socio-hydrology, hydrosocial theory, and the multiple ontologies of water, respectively. While the present paper acknowledges the great merits of each of these perspectives, it starts from the identification of two important shortcomings in current social water research: the dispersion of the literature in distinct disciplinary subfields and the lack of specifically sociological approaches to hydrosocial issues. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is twofold: to offer a "big picture" of current social water research from a sociologicaltheoretical perspective and to initiate a fruitful conversation between sociologists and social water researchers from other disciplines.
Socio-hydrology and hydrosocial analysis: toward dialogues across disciplines
In this study, we review the ways in which water has recently been conceptualized by both natural and social scientists as either hydro-social or socio-hydrological. We do this in order to discuss whether and how they can be compatible, in order to enable dialogue across disciplines that seek to address the ecological and social challenges related to the complex human/water interactions. Through our review, we document the emergence of these specific terminologies , identify how these terms—and the conceptualizations they represent—relate to each other, and suggest what opportunities there are for building further interdisciplinary approaches to understanding water and society. Specifically, we review the recent rise in socio-hydrology amongst natural scientists/hydrologists to put this in discussion with a much longer tradition in social sciences of seeing water as both natural and social. We identify what the paradigms are in both conceptualizations in order to assess what their respective focus is, and what they omit. Our purpose is not to judge competing claims. Rather we want to assess the knowledge claims made in both paradigms: what can we learn when we employ these different approaches, what different rationales for action do they suggest, and what scope exists for collaboration. We conclude that there is scope in combining both approaches without a need to antagonistically question their respective fundamental assumptions, and playing to the strengths of each: the rich case study narratives produced by hydrosocial research can be the basis for the conceptual and quantitative modeling of socio-hydrology.
Critical Water Geographies: From Histories to Affect
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Water resource geography has undergone a considerable transformation since its original moorings in engineering and the pure sciences. As this Special Issue demonstrates, many intellectual and practical gains are being made through a politicized practice of water scholarship. This work by geographers integrates a critical social scientific perspective on agency, power relations, method and most importantly the affective/emotional aspects of water with profound familiarity and expertise across sub-disciplines and regions. Here, the ‘critical’ aspects of water resource geography imply anti-positivist epistemologies pressed into the service of contributing to social justice and liberation from water-related political and material struggles. The five papers making up this Special Issue address these substantive and theoretical concerns across South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America.
Muddy Waters: Refining the Way Forward for the “Sustainability Science” of Socio-Hydrogeology
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The trouble with groundwater is that despite its critical importance to global water supplies, it frequently attracts insufficient management attention relative to more visible surface water sources, irrespective of regional climate, socioeconomic profile, and regulatory environment. To this end, the recently defined sub-discipline of “socio-hydrogeology”, an extension of socio-hydrology, seeks to translate and exchange knowledge with and between non-expert end-users, in addition to involving non-expert opinion and experience in hydrogeological investigations, thus emphasising a “bottom-up” methodology. It is widely acknowledged that issues pertaining to groundwater quality, groundwater quantity, climate change, and a poor general awareness and understanding of groundwater occurrence and movement are global in their scope. Moreover, while effective communication and engagement represent the key tenet of socio-hydrogeology, the authors consider that multiple actors should be identifi...
Socio‐hydrology: Scientific Challenges in Addressing a Societal Grand Challenge
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030 represent an ambitious blueprint to reduce inequalities globally and achieve a sustainable future for all mankind. Meeting the SDGs for water requires an integrated approach to managing and allocating water resources, by involving all actors and stakeholders, and considering how water resources link different sectors of society. To date, water management practice is dominated by technocratic, scenario-based approaches that may work well in the short term but can result in unintended consequences in the long term due to limited accounting of dynamic feedbacks between the natural, technical, and social dimensions of human-water systems. The discipline of sociohydrology has an important role to play in informing policy by developing a generalizable understanding of phenomena that arise from interactions between water and human systems. To explain these phenomena, sociohydrology must address several scientific challenges to strengthen the field and broaden its scope. These include engagement with social scientists to accommodate social heterogeneity, power relations, trust, cultural beliefs, and cognitive biases, which strongly influence the way in which people alter, and adapt to, changing hydrological regimes. It also requires development of new methods to formulate and test alternative hypotheses for the explanation of emergent phenomena generated by feedbacks between water and society. Advancing sociohydrology in these ways therefore represents a major contribution toward meeting the targets set by the SDGs, the societal grand challenge of our time. Plain Language Summary Water crises that humanity faces are increasingly connected and are growing in complexity. As such, they require a more integrated approach in managing water resources, which involves all actors and stakeholders and considers how water resources link different sectors of society. Yet, water management practice is still dominated by technocratic approaches, which emphasize technical solutions. While these approaches may work in the short-term, they often result in unintended consequences in the long-term. Sociohydrology is developing a generalizable understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between natural,technical and social processes, which can improve water management practice. As such, advancing sociohydrology can contribute to address the global water crises and meet the water-related targets defined by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Editorial: Water matters: agency, flows, and frictions
To say that water is crucial to life is axiomatic. It pervades daily life, manifests itself in a variety of spaces and forms, and is used in a multitude of ways. It also pervades geography's history as an academic discipline, whether through studies of hydrological processes, examinations of resource distribution, or conceptualisations of nature ^ culture relationships. Water's place in such theorising is not limited to recent explorations in political ecology and hybridity but extends back to Semple's 1911 account of water's ``role in shaping the history of specific societies'' (Ekers and Loftus, 2008, page 699). Geographers' engagement with water is diverse and disparate. Our aim in developing this theme issue is to showcase a diversity of ontological and epistemological approaches to understanding and examining water, bringing them together to highlight some of the directions future research on human ^water relations might take.
Exploring Political Ecologies of Water and Development
2013
This theme issue draws on political ecology scholarship to explore how hydrosocial relations are produced and transformed through development interventions that provide and manage water in the Global South. In the five papers that draw insights from different contexts globally, the authors examine historical and contemporary water-related development interventions to show how power is produced through water in ways that perpetuate, or even exacerbate, inequality, exclusion, and impoverishment. In doing so, the authors contest a set of important yet taken-for-granted narratives around water provision in international development. The broader ambition of the theme issue is to direct research on water-related development interventions in the Global South in new and productive ways, by showing how water and power relations intersect to shape differential access and outcomes among diverse social groups, to configure particular discourses around water management, and to produce uneven waterscapes ). Thus, the theme issue contributes to wider theorisations of water and power, and advances the understanding of the socionatural hybridity of water, whereby flows of water are not external to power relations, but intricately enmeshed in, and reflective of, them .
Socio-hydrology advanced the field of hydrology by considering humans and their activities as part of the water cycle, rather than as external drivers. Models are used to infer reproducible trends in human interactions with water resources. However, defining and handling water problems in this way may restrict the scope of such modeling approaches. We propose an interdisciplinary socio-hydrological approach to overcome this limit and complement modeling approaches. It starts from concrete field-based situations, combines disciplinary as well as local knowledge on water-society relationships, with the aim of broadening the hydrocentric analysis and modeling of water systems. The paper argues that an analysis of social dynamics linked to water is highly complementary to traditional hydrological tools but requires a negotiated and contextualized interdisciplinary approach to the representation and analysis of socio-hydro systems. This reflection emerged from experience gained in the field where a water-budget modeling framework failed to adequately incorporate the multiplicity of (nonhydrological) factors that determine the volumes of withdrawals for irrigation. The pathway subsequently explored was to move away from the hydrologic view of the phenomena and, in collaboration with social scientists, to produce a shared conceptualization of a coupled human-water system through a negotiated approach. This approach changed the way hydrological research issues were addressed and limited the number of strong assumptions needed for simplification in modeling. The proposed socio-hydrological approach led to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind local water-related problems and to debates on the interactions between social and political decisions and the dynamics of these problems.
Social Water: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop
Christine Gilmore, Nicola Pritchard, Sarah Bennison, Will Wright, Hannah Boast, Emilija Lipovsek, George Holmes, Claire Chambers, Jonathan Finch, Niranjana Ramesh, Hetta Howes, Satya Savitzky
"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop 25th October 2013, University of York Call for Papers – deadline 13th September Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture. Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land. This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject. Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to: Water privatisation Water on film Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies Gendered engagements with water Water in religion, performance and ritual Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes Disasters and reconstruction Embodiment, memory and affect The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds. This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."