Bringing the “social” into sociohydrology: Conservation policy support in the Central Great Plains of Kansas, USA

Abstract

Identifying means of empirically modeling the human component of a coupled, human‐water system becomes critically important to further advances in sociohydrology. We develop a social‐psychological model of environmental decision making that addresses four key challenges of incorporating social science into integrated models. We use the model to explain preferences for three conservation policies designed to conserve and protect water resources and aquatic ecosystems in the Smoky Hill River Basin, a semiarid agricultural region in the Central U.S. Great Plains. Further, we compare the model's capacity to explain policy preferences among members of two groups in the River Basin: agricultural producers and members of nonfarming communities. We find that financial obligation is the strongest and most consistent explanation of support for conservation policies among members of both groups. We also find that policy support is grounded in cultural values—deeply held ideas about right and wrong. Environmental values are particularly important explanations of policy support. The constellations of values invoked to make decisions about policies, and the social‐psychological pathways linking values to policy support, can vary across policies and types of agents (farmers and nonfarmers). We discuss the implications of the results for future research in sociohydrology.

Twenty-three unsolved problems in hydrology (UPH) – a community perspective

“…While water resources systems analysis (Brown et al 2015) has dealt with such interactions from an optimisation perspective on a case-by-case basis, much is to be learned by developing a generalisable understanding of phenomena that arise from the interactions between water and human systems. Thus, as socio-economic perspectives (Castro 2007, Sanderson et al 2017 are being integrated in these feedbacks, the interest is not only on decision support but also on the role of society in the hydrological cycle in its own right. Second, new topics seem to emerge where hydrology can play a more important role such as contaminants of emerging concern, microbial pathogens, or, more generally, the topic of water and health (e.g.…”

Factors Influencing Public-Sphere Pro-Environmental Behavior among Mongolian College Students: A Test of Value–Belief–Norm Theory

“…In addition, some researchers consider NEP an indicator of the awareness of consequences in NAM in testing the relationship between social-psychological factors and pro-environmental behavior [28]. Since its proposal, VBN has been widely employed to explain many specific pro-environmental behaviors in the private or public sphere, such as green consumer behavior [29][30][31][32], biodiversity conservation [33,34], travel behavior [35][36][37], sustainability behavior [18,38], recycling [39,40], energy conservation [41][42][43][44][45][46], transport modes [47][48][49], and support for pro-environmental policies [50][51][52][53]. Because of value orientations, the new environmental paradigm (NEP) and pro-environmental personal norms (PPN) are vital predictors of pro-environmental behavior in the VBN framework [54].…”

Expanding the Scope and Foundation of Sociohydrology as the Science of Coupled Human‐Water Systems

“…Because generalization continues to be a goal in sociohydrology, there is a real need to develop empirical frameworks that span time and space, while recognizing the context‐specificity of human systems. Sanderson et al () take a step in this direction. Situated at the individual level, this paper develops a social‐psychological model to explain policy choices among citizens in a semiarid agricultural region in the Central U.S. Great Plains.…”