The session aims to reconcile socio-hydrology with other fields such as hydro-sociology, hydro-economics and integrated water resources management. Concepts dealing with human-water relations such as waterscapes, hydro-social cycle, water governance or hydroinformatics already explore the linkages and feedbacks between the natural and social systems. However, the perspectives and research approaches on these human-water relations, e.g. positivist thinking common in natural and engineering sciences and constructivist thinking common in social sciences, differ with respect to the disciplines. Mutual recognition of the different epistemologies, concepts, actors, stakeholders and methods, and acknowledging the multiple meanings and alternative framings of the human-water system is a prerequisite for a productive exchange.

Socio-hydrology proposes to understand coupled human-water systems by conceptualizing its components to be dynamically connected by bi-directional feedbacks. Examples of such feedbacks include economic forces such as agricultural or industrial production, diffusion or adoption of technology and knowledge such as water harvesting, community awareness such as emergence of environmental movements, values and norms etc. The session therefore aims to trigger a discourse on understanding such systems at a diversity of scales. We welcome contributions from researchers from social and natural sciences who are keen to look beyond their research perspective and who like to discuss their research findings in relation to other approaches.

Abstracts are solicited on topics that deal with planetary water boundary concepts, integrated assessment models (IAMs), water history and archaeology, sustainability of engineered river basins, water valuation (both monetary and non-monetary), urbanizing deltas etc with a focus on understanding feedbacks between human society and their environment and/or simulating plausible co-evolutionary dynamics that emerges into the future. Resulting policy insights for a sustainable future are equally welcomed. Coupled systems can be human-flood systems, human-infrastructure systems, human-irrigation systems, human-agricultural systems, human-delta systems etc. Papers of theoretical, conceptual or applied nature are solicited that 1) contribute to the understanding of complex human-water relations and their management, and that 2) discuss the benefits and shortcomings based on empirical, conceptual or model-based research and disciplinary perspective.

This session is jointly developed with the framework of the Panta Rhei Research Initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) under the working group of “Socio-hydrological modeling and synthesis”.