Grounding sociohydrology through a justice lens

This paper considers the theoretical and empirical potential of a focus on water justice to ground sociohydrology scholarship. The field of sociohydrology recognises the role of humans in altering – deliberately or not – hydrological flows and seeks to account for the feedbacks and interactions between human and water systems. This scholarship, however, tends to reduce the role of humans and societies to social variables and indicators and is anchored in the ontological separation of nature-society, with nature as the 'anchor' of truth claims. The preference is for larger datasets, and for knowers as positioned outside of (and as independent from) what they study. These approaches are less suited for unravelling the social processes generative of so-called global water challenges, while they also are difficult to translate into actionable insights and tools that are useful to those making actual water decisions (water managers, policy makers, and civil society actors). In our paper, we discuss possible ways of ‘grounding’ sociohydrology in order to better capture sociohistorical contexts, recognize power relations and embrace multiple ways of knowing water. Conceptually, we examine how critical water studies – focusing on water equity and justice - can provide ways of ‘grounding’ sociohydrological understandings of water-society relations. We specifically consider how Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges in helping do this methodologically and conceptually. Empirically, we draw on our own research expertise to argue that grounded, empirical case studies can significantly add to theorisations of socionatural change, providing critical insights into processes of societal inclusion and exclusion, and the production of social difference through water – insights that can provide a good basis for imagining and helping develop just transformations to water sustainability.