From Water Commons to Digital Twins: Hybrid Epistemologies for Transformative Water Governance

Abstract (English)

The current abstract draws on a transdisciplinary journey, from participatory water commons in Italy to digital twin models for urban resilience, to bridge socio-hydrology and hydro-social approaches. At its core lies the ambition to reconceptualize water as a resource and as a relational, socio-ecological commons (Ostrom, 1990; OECD, 2015).
Empirical examples include participatory resistance to privatisation in Italy, which highlights localised governance and justice claims, and the development of INVAR Twin, a real-time urban stormwater model that simulates hydrological invariance under climate pressure (WE Expert Group, 2024). The digital twin integrates live IoT sensor data, land-use maps, and hydrodynamic simulations to offer a decision-support tool aligned with EU resilience goals.
Socio-hydrological models (Di Baldassarre et al., 2013; Elshafei et al., 2014) provide the backbone to quantify human–water feedbacks, while frameworks like CANDHY (Nardi et al., 2020) illustrate how citizen-generated data and local knowledge can be embedded into hydrological systems, by aligning with calls for more inclusive, adaptive modelling beyond positivist paradigms (Di Baldassarre et al., 2015).
Ultimately, the presentation advocates for hybrid epistemologies integrating digital technologies, local knowledge, and participatory methods. This approach advances technical solutions and reimagines water governance as a democratic, culturally embedded, and collaborative process.