Globally, 150 riparian countries share approximately 310 transboundary rivers covering 47.1% of the Earth’s land surface and contribute to about 60% of the world’s freshwater resources. These river systems are crucial for global and regional water security. The management of transboundary water is often challenging due to the complexity of the systems, which are based on not only hydrological factors (e.g., the conflicting demand and management preferences among users), but also socio-political factors (e.g., national power). The essence of Socio-hydrology is to study the coevolution of social and hydrological systems and its interactive process over different time scales. The coevolution of the slow (e.g. societal value change) and fast processes (e.g. runoff) in a socio-hydrological system may result in the emergent phenomena in the long term. In this regard, cooperation and conflict dynamics can be treated as an emergent phenomenon at the scale of a transboundary river, which can be explained by the complex interaction of hydrological, political, and socio-economic factors. The cooperation and conflict dynamics affect the hydrological regime in rivers through dam constructions and dam operating policies, and are in turn shaped by the economic gains and institutional factors. Taking a Socio-hydrological modeling approach can be beneficial in investigating the feedback mechanisms and providing informative insights for resilient mechanisms on sustainable water management through explaining the emergent cooperation and conflict dynamics.

This session is organised as part of the IAHS Panta Rhei hydrological decade 2013-2022, and welcomes contributions that improve our understanding of dynamic human-water systems with a focus on exploring transboundary feedback mechanisms between water systems (including dam operation, dam storage, dam capacity and water demand) and human systems (including political factors, socio-economic factors and institutional factors). Topics may include but not limited to: 1) Conceptual framework, empirical models, narratives to understand the emergent conflict/cooperation dynamics in transboundary rivers; 2) Statistical analysis for determining the important factors that play significant roles in the conflict cooperation dynamics; 3) Comparative studies across multiple transboundary river basins; 4) Innovative assessment of episodes of conflict and cooperation over global international river basins