Hydro-sociology: Theories, Methods and Politics of Working with Waters and People

Abstract (English)

Increasing portions of the world are struggling with issues associated with water: its scarcity or excess, the political, economical, and logistical matters of its management, its place in the cultural horizons of communities and in institutional development plans. The most recent climate changes, coupled with an intensifying environmental degradation, are aggravating these issues. But the socio-technical management of water(s) has always been a crucial node in the resilience and prosperity strategies of societies worldwide. Throughout the last century, “Western” paradigms of water ownership, management and infrastructure engineering became dominant globally, informing small- and large-scale projects led by local, national, and international agencies.
In recent years, emerging from social and hydrological sciences, respectively, socio-hydrology and hydrosocial research have developed as interdisciplinary subjects seeking to embrace hydrological dynamics with critical approaches, such as political ecology and anthropology of development, aiming to problematize such epochal shift, assess its socio-ecological repercussions, and find alternative solutions that are sustainable and suitable for local cultures and ecosystems. Even though these subfields have developed in parallel with different methods and focuses, there is much potential for fertile discussion and cooperation between the two.
Hydrosocial approaches mainly reflect on power dynamics in water management, showing practitioners the importance of valorizing emic conceptions of water and local water-management solutions; or pushing water governance beyond privatization and commoditization, and towards frameworks that stress water access as a human right or that allow communities to manage their own waterscapes.
Socio-hydrology approaches focus on practical responses to ecological stress, for example by challenging a certain “hydrological orientalism” in water projects (that fail to see water pools other than surface flow or accumulation, hence the hydrological potential of arid landscapes) and fostering solutions that also value “green waters”: those often-overlooked hydrological resources stored in soils and plants.
The challenge of moving beyond the positivist paradigm of the “Western water cycle” and its management corollaries calls for new, inclusive epistemologies that are able to provide different perspectives and knowledges on human-water interactions. Our panel seeks to show some of the theoretical and practical advantages of hybrid approaches for socio-ecological issues, especially for the increasingly fraught domain of people-water relationships.