Socio-hydrology: an interplay of design and self-organization in a multilevel world

Abstract

The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrology involve some aspects of engineering design, such as large-scale water infrastructure, and self-organization in a broad context, such as cultural change at the population level and the hydrologic shift at the river basin or aquifer level. However, within the field of socio-hydrology, it has been difficult to find general theories that assist our understanding of the dynamics emerging from the interplay between design and selforganization, hindering generalization of phenomena between cases. We address this gap by developing insights on how the theoretical frameworks of robustness-fragility trade-off and cultural multilevel selection can inform our understanding in this regard. We apply the two theories to two cases in the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh and the Kissimmee River Basin in Florida, illustrating how the two theories may provide general insights into causal mechanisms shaping the socio-hydrological phenomena observed in the two cases. Specifically, we use the two theories to address (1) the transference of system fragility across different domains due to design choices and (2) the multilevel social processes in the nested organizational hierarchy that lead to the formation or collapse of shared cultural traits. We show that these two theories, separately or taken together, can provide richer theoretical grounding for understanding socio-hydrological phenomena.

Worldwide Research on Socio-Hydrology: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Subsequently, a socio-hydrogeological vision was implemented to assess the quality of groundwater [163]. Finally, Yu mentioned that socio-hydrology analyses socio-ecological systems, focusing on the human-water link's co-evolution that favours water safety and sustainability [164].…”

Water management, hydrological extremes, and society: modeling interactions and phenomena

“…Socio-hydrological models are often built to formalize hypotheses about the macroscopic (or generic) behavior of human-water systems by schematizing the feedback mechanisms that generate multiple phenomena, risks, and/or unintended consequences (Yu et al 2020). As such, they are different from: (1) predictive quantitative models (more common in hydrology), usually based on physically based equations, but often lacking an explicit representation of human behavior and social dynamics; (2) prescriptive optimization models used for the study of waterresource systems that often assume that people in a real system will make rational and optimal choices (Sterman 2002); and (3) descriptive qualitative methods (more common in social sciences), typically based on the critical analysis of political, cultural, and social processes around specific case studies.…”

Socio-hydrology, politicization of water science and implication of the Eyes on Earth Study on the contemporary research dialogue in the Lancang-Mekong Basin

“…Among other challenges belong the limited plurality of views on complex socio-hydrological issues (e.g. Yu et al 2020;Roobavannan et al 2018;Massuel et al 2018), pressure on conceptualizing the causal relations in humanwater interaction (e.g. Madani and Shafiee-Jood, 2020;Evers et al 2017;Lane, 2014), underdeveloped fact-checking tools (e.g.…”