Reframing resilience-oriented urban water management: Learning from social-ecological-technological system interactions and uncertainties in a water scarce city

There is limited understanding of how to address the complex dynamics shaping the resilience of increasingly water-scarce cities, globally. This requires moving beyond managing water scarcity through infrastructural measures to understanding resilience as an outcome of complex interactions between social, ecological and technological system elements. By conceptualizing urban water systems as Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) and analysing their interactions from different stakeholder perspectives, we create a pluralistic, yet systematic, understanding of SETS interactions. We conducted a household survey (N=300) and expert interviews (N=19) in Amman, one of the world’s water scarcity hotspots, and analysed the data in three steps: 1) Inspired by frame analysis, we interpreted the SETS through the lens of its different actor groups and found that each group focuses on different system elements and interactions: Local experts focus on deficits of SETS elements and aim to increase available resources, while international experts emphasize the efficiency of SETS interactions. Households cope with deficient water supplies by mobilizing adaptive strategies. 2) We derived uncertainties resulting from these different (and unrecognized) stakeholder views, missing knowledge, and unpredictable system dynamics. 3) We identified and characterized new SETS interactions, which contributes to a growing typology of SETS aiming for better comparability across SETS. Our results have implications for resilience-oriented urban water management and governance in terms of what to manage (e.g., slow variables/feedbacks), how to manage by enhancing deeper levels of learning across stakeholder groups, and by whom. The latter requires a broadened participation in the process of of transforming the city's water system towards greater system resilience and sustainability.