Progress in socio‐hydrology: a meta‐analysis of challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Socio-hydrology was introduced 4 years ago into the scientific lexicon, and elicited several reactions about the meaning and originality of the concept. However, there has also been much activity triggered by the original paper, including further commentaries that clarified the definitions, and several papers that acted on the definitions, and through these activities further clarified and illustrated the meaning and usefulness of socio-hydrology for understanding coupled human-water systems and to assist with sustainable water management. This paper restates the case for socio-hydrology by articulating the need to consider the two-way feedbacks between human and water systems in order to explain puzzles, paradoxes, and unintended consequences that arise in the context of water management, and to suggest ways to avoid or overcome these challenges. The paper then presents a critical review of past research on socio-hydrology through the prism of historical, comparative, and process socio-hydrology, documenting both the progress made and the challenges faced. Much of the work done so far has involved studies of socio-hydrological systems in spatially isolated domains (e.g., river basins), and phenomena that involve emergent patterns in the time domain. The modeling studies so far have involved testing hypotheses about how these temporal patterns arise. An important feature that distinguishes socio-hydrology from other related fields is the importance of allowing human agency (e.g., socioeconomics, technology, norms, and values) to be endogenous to the systems. This paper articulates the need to extend sociohydrology to explore phenomena in space and in space-time, as the world becomes increasingly globalized and human-water systems become highly interconnected. The endogenization of human agency, in terms of values and norms, technology, economics, and trade must now be extended to space and to spacetime. This is a necessity, and a challenge, for water sustainability, but presents exciting opportunities for further research. © 2016 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article:WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1193. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1193 INTRODUCTIONH umans have been exploiting the Earth's natural resources at an accelerating pace ever since intense economic activity was triggered by the industrial revolution. This exploitation of the Earth's natural resources facilitated, and was in turn facilitated by, technological innovations. These innovations included extraction of iron ore, the steam engine, and faster ships, railroads, and several other means This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.subsequently that connected people worldwide through trade. Concerted ambitions of humans in different parts of the world with their unique niches, now connected through trade, fuelled the...

Human–water interface in hydrological modelling: current status and future directions

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A framework for modelling the complexities of food and water security under globalisation

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Norms and values in sociohydrological models

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