 Good evening everybody, welcome. My name is Mohan, I am a PhD student here at the Institute. I welcome you all on behalf of the PhD fellow community here and on behalf of the graduate school. We welcome you to this second weekend debate, the first debate we had about 35 students and a small group. I'm really happy to see more people coming in to hope this goes. Today we have the weekend debate on a day of two disciplines and we have two women speakers, Professor Murugesh Sivapalan and Dr. Jessica. And we also have a very, very informed moderator, Anna Hussain. So she will be monitoring the session. We have two women speakers and the moderator for this evening. Dr. Anna Hussain was educated at Wahili University in tropical land and motor management. She gained extensive experience at the height of this in UK and Africa. In her three pieces, she analyzed the roles of health expertise in motor resources management. And she continued to research the processes of scientific knowledge, production, policy population, and implementation in several research volumes. She is now a host of a Doctor of Telok Institute. Dr. Jessica Burks is a female geographer with an interdisciplinary background in environmental development and regional socialism in Latin America. She holds an MA in Hispanic studies from the University of Glasgow and overseeing environmental issues in Latin America, from the University of London, and the people in geography from the University of Oxford. She's with the University of East India since 2013. Professor Dr. Murray Srisilopalan is a hydraulic engineer and an anomaly hydrologist. His recent work has focused on modeling the co-evolutionary dynamics of public, human, water, and ecological systems. Dr. Srisilopalan was the founding chair of the International Association of Hydrogeological Sciences. He played on predictions in a huge base and initiative. He has been a member of editorial boards of several international journals and was executive editor of the European Geosciences, Human Hydrology, and Recessing Sciences, probably known as HES, during the last 10 years. Dr. Srisilopalan is now with the University of London. I welcome Anna to come and give a brief introduction about the topic of this evening. Welcome everybody, it's great to see so many faces. Thank you very much for inviting me to moderate this discussion. Now, we talk about a tale of two disciplines. I would like to introduce the two groups by explaining why we talk about two disciplines. Why is it important that I'm not listening? We keep in mind that these people do really very different kinds of research. However, the object of studying you could say is the same, which is the mutual sharing. You could say it's the same, which is the mutual shaping of water and human systems. So, thank you for a beautiful talk with these pictures. We all know that water systems are not natural anymore. Humans use the water system and use this arrow by constructing dams, by constructing irrigation systems, etc. So, we get a modified natural system, as indicated on the top floor. For example, the ecology changes, but also a modified social system. So, it works two ways. There's electrification, which gives benefits. There's irrigation, growth, but also negative impact, for example, evictions, to construct the dam. Some benefits and some don't. Now, to conceptualise the social, society and nature relations, I would say there is a natural system, the blue one from hydrology, there's a social system, the green one on the right, and they overlap. But this is only one perspective. Jessica will explain another perspective on this interaction of systems. Now, thank you for this slide. Please do it in our project. Ultimately, you could argue that both types of research that we will hear about tonight present a way to know water, which, of course, is what all of the institute is about. Now, I think we all agree we don't know water anymore as just a hydrological, by just studying the hydrological cycle. To know water, we will have to take into account the human use of water. But there is yet another way of knowing water, which focuses on water as a political substance and as an economic substance. So it studies different elements of society than the one on the left. Now, one piece of toolkit that will help you to understand, to interpret the two presentations that will hear, is the idea of research paradigm. When we talk about different types of research and we talk about interdisciplinarity, we have a tendency of focusing on the methodology. We tend to look at what are you doing? Are you doing modeling? Are you doing quantitative work? Are you maybe doing some discourse analysis, text analysis? So we tend to focus on what you do. But we have to remember that what these two speakers do also has very fundamentally different foundations which are called paradigms. And I will not be able to explain this in detail. I think most of you have received the paper where I discussed and compared these to look so you'll be able to have a better read later on if you haven't read it already. But what is important, I think, in this table is two terms, ontology and epistemology. And ontology means your basic view of the world. And a very simple one to explain this is to say, okay, the earth is flat, or the earth is a circle. There are examples of ontology. Another example of ontology is to say humans are rational economic actors versus humans take decisions on emotional, cultural, but also some economic grounds. So those are examples of ontology. It's your world view. It's how you see the world, these basic assumptions. And epistemology is another very important element of research paradigm. Epistemology answers the question, what can we know? And there's a basic contradiction between the assumption that we can have objective truth or that all our knowledge is subjective and an interpretation of reality. Now the second one allows for different non-existence to coexist to allow different interpretations of the world. So without any further ado, I'm really curious and interested to hear the presentations. Afterwards, I will ask both speakers. So they first do their presentations, then we will come back to the stage and I will ask both speakers to reflect very briefly on these two questions. The first one is what is the scope for collaboration or maybe even integration between your two research approaches? And I have given an answer in my paper, but that's not necessarily what they agree with. Maybe you have other answers. Maybe you have questions around this. The second question is how could a water manager and I was keeping you in mind use these different types of research when you go back home? So those two questions will be the questions to introduce in discussion. And please also, you are invited to reflect on this and to give your opinion and the speakers have confirmed they are very interested to hear from you. So thank you very much and please Jessica, it's your turn. I'm vertically challenged in other words. Standing on my tiptoes. Thank you to Jonathan and colleagues for inviting me and here this afternoon to engage in this wiki to debate. I've never before participated in a wiki to debate and the word wicked in English actually has at least three different meanings. Evil, complex and great slang meanings. So let's see what kind of wiki to debate we're going to have. So I'm going to present today the concept in broad outline of the concept of the hydro-social cycle and as I've been developing it and in close collaboration with a colleague of mine, Jamie Linton, who's a professor at the University of Le Mans in France. And the main objective of the presentation is to give an outline of the idea of the hydro-social cycle to explain what we believe it is and what it does and what it doesn't do. I've structured the presentation into five parts, if you like. Outlining first where the concept comes from. Obviously linked in some way to the hydro-hideological cycle. Talking then about how social scientists have addressed the relationship between humans and water over the years and how the hydro-social, our concept of the hydro-social cycle emerges from that. Then I'll talk a bit more specifically about how we understand the framing of the hydro-social cycle and then how it can be used as an analytical framework, where it directs attention. And then I'll finish with some final remarks. So this is a paper by the Second Speed Cross Dean Professor. And what I just want to highlight here is that it's exactly the relationship between people and water that the hydro-social cycle develops. And it's the nature of the relationship between those components. And I think that's where the main difference is going to lies. I think also Anna hinted in her presentation just now. Another version of the hydro-ological cycle obviously a very simple one showing the hydro-ological processes that operate in any given place in the world and leading to our conception of the hydro-social cycle. So this comes out of social scientists perceived the limitations of the hydro-ological cycle. Firstly, as Anna has already mentioned that it extracts physical processes from the social context. It tries to study hydro-ological processes as if that environment were not influenced by humans. Something that obviously sociology now responds to. Other critiques of the hydro-ological cycle are the fact that it's a universal model for any place in the world even though many environments in the world are not reflected very well by the hydro-ological cycle. Including, for example, very cold environments, very wet or seasonal environments and very dry environments. And drawing on Jamie Linton's work the hydro-ological cycle has a history. It came out of somewhere, came out of a set of people in a time in history. Just to summarise very quickly Jamie Linton argues that the hydro-ological cycle is not necessarily a paradigm for understanding water flows in the environment itself. But it was also instrumental in allowing a hydrology to separate from other sciences and form a separate science in the 1930s USA. And while you might think that history is irrelevant the hydro-ological cycle by focusing solely on physical processes, privileges because I know people have privileges technical expertise over water from hydrological scientists and engineers in particular. So since the 1980s or something water studies, debates, policies have moved a lot more in the social direction where we emphasise less technical expertise, infrastructure and water and the ways that decisions about water are made. So from water management to water governance. And we now recognise more fully as Anna has already said the influence of humans on water processes, water cycles. And in the remotest parts of the world where pollution, for example, can be detected. And moving away also from a previous key paradigm of integrated water resources management that sought to coordinate uses and uses better to this idea of governance and that everybody has a role to play in making decisions about water and how it's allocated to different users. So in our work we argue that the hydrological cycle is no longer sufficient as the key paradigm behind water in this new era that privileges water governance. And so we need a new concept that explains how water works and that we argue is more the hydro-social cycle. So the hydro-social cycle as I said with the title of the professor's paper it's about rethinking society's relationship with water. And moving away from the idea that there are simply links between people and water to the idea that water itself is constructed and produced socially. So Jamie Linton has offered the concept of modern water whereby he argues that H2O, the fact that water is H2O is a modern construction and that H2O is a label for many different things that are all labeled as water because they can be reduced to their chemical components. So water is actually a resource that's very diverse in its forms and the types of relations that it has with humans that go far beyond it being H2O including its culture as Americans and for many social groups. So we're questioning the way that water is constructed as solely H2O and the way that water is produced. So water is not just given it doesn't just exist in the environment it is made through human processes and as such it internalizes politics in its very nature. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about the way that social scientists have approached the relationship between water and society in order to explain the foundations of the hydro-social cycle. So Carl Wittbuerl was one of the first to come up with a dialectical notion of water whereby he recognized that the way in which humans managed or manipulated water also had knock-on effects on how society was constituted primarily through his study of large-scale water infrastructure in the American West and had a committed large-scale irrigation which in turn consolidated the power of bureaucrats and investors. So he recognizes that two-way relationship between people and water. People manipulate water but water also in turn allows a different society to emerge but he kept those two elements people and water distinct. Two elements that interacted with and changed each other but they were two separate things still. Then with the political ecology tradition and notions of hybrid nature and Eric Swingadau's work in particular we start to see water itself described as a hybrid nature and I've got here a quote from one of Swingadau's papers where he talks about water so he says if I were to capture some water in a cup like a drinking cup and excavate the networks that brought it there I would pass with continuity from the local to the global from the human to the non-human quoting that all. These flows would narrate many interrelated tales or stories of social groups and classes and the powerful sociological processes that produce social spaces of privilege and exclusion participation and marginality chemical, physical and biological reactions and transformations the global hydrological cycle and global warming capital machinations and strategies and knowledges of dam builders urban land developers and engineers the passage from river to urban reservoir and the geopolitical struggles between regions and nations So what Swingadau is essentially saying here that these processes are all embodied in the drinking water so that any one of us might capture in our cup or glass So the water in that cup is not simply a substance of H2O that water comes from somewhere to produce through these processes it embodies these that aren't seen from the pure material substance in the cup So what Swingadau is doing there which is different from the historical that he is positing water as something that's internally related where the social processes are embodied within that outcome of water in a cup rather than two separate spheres of society of water interacting with each other And the other thing that he does via this view of things is to emphasise the processes that are behind water over the form of water itself over the product of the substance that we see and that we can quite easily take as very unproblematic water So the hydro-social cycle as we myself and Linton put it forwards builds on these two approaches in particular Swingadau's approach and integrates relationality and materiality into that So build on bit bubble by recognising that social relations always shape water whatever water that is of it's drinking water or dam water or river basin that's been engineered etc and in turn the social relations are shaped or reshaped by water and we take the materiality argument by seeing water as a lively resource that also plays a role in its management in its social relations through its physical form as a flowing resource for example that's often not easily bounded and also a resource that's very meaningful and culturally significant to different groups and there's been quite a lot of work around the ways in which waters flow and tides and things like that shape social relations and then we also bring in a relational dimension by especially cositing that water is the same thing so anyone who speaks Spanish will know that water is typically written to as aguas in plural not the singular and that's what we're getting at when we talk about waters we're talking about waters we're talking about different things and the different things with which relations are different as well and the different experiences that different types of water provoke so we've already seen this no it's behind it's very ubiquitous nowadays and we have it in the paper as well we even contacted and Kate Ely to ask to reproduce it which she kindly agreed to so this is often represented as the hydro-social cycle because obviously as you can see you have the hydrological processes and they are influenced by social processes most notably the water flowing not downstream but upstream and towards money to be used for commercial agriculture or whatever so this picture is more like it it's more in the direction of the hydro-social cycle but it shows a bit more how humans manipulate water and manipulate the hydrological cycle but very much less on what the effects of that are on social relations on access on cultural meanings on peoples identity so we have to still go beyond that kind of representation so as you can see through that diagram it represents some of those political and economic factors the diagram itself was a diagram that Kate drew following discussions with a North American First Nation tri about the pressures that they felt on the water resources being part of an indigenous reservation whereby they could control the area within the reservation but not that outside but it focuses very much on how people flows and how people manipulate those flows but not on how those flows change then as a society their identity so we define the hydro-social cycle as a process through which water and society make and remake each other over space and time so there's a historical and geographical dimension there so the idea is that people understand it's different forms and that's made water then shapes society in different ways politics, discourses, identities and again that society thus shapes by water then reacts to water in a different way in a spiral type formation so water is produced by society and it produces a society and so it goes on but never returning to the same water and the same society we had a lot of debate at the time whether to retain the term cycle in the hydro-social cycle because as I said we're not returning to the same things in a constant process of going around we're making and remaking and then remaking again and so cycle for us is not circulation none of the circulation through the material environment and society but this constant process of making and remaking so one of the things that we want to do by the hydro-social cycle is see power because this is a political ecology approach which is not necessarily a neutral water approach we want to understand the relationship between water and power but very much understanding that power as within the water as embedded within the water as in the example from Suberdove and not just power around water as an external substance from society or over water so the power is very much embedded within the water not simply around it and this process of production of water seeing what is always produced always the outcome of social relations is necessary to be able to do that and also as I said before the way that water itself has an agency plays a role in that relationship it's not an inert substance or framework there are four key things that from a political ecology approach the hydro-social cycle is useful for doing so the first one relates to the ontology that Anna mentioned what is water and that's one of the key things that we're questioning here we're questioning the nature of water from a material substance that's modernised and is very much to own a water that exists in the same form everywhere but rather something that always has that story behind it as in it's limitedised water in a cup recognising the heterogeneity of water but everything that we call water even though that's what we've done for all our lives and as a Spanish speaker recognising that water encompasses a wide range of different things and a good example of this is desalinated water so for some of the masters and PhD students among you I've put some references just so you could have a look if you weren't interested so desalinated water is the ultimate produced water because it's completely made or manufactured by humans taken from the sea reversing the classic hydrological cycle and taking out the salt and making water for human usually human consumption and aside from lots of the issues with that process of high energy use contamination of marine environments that water produces different relations so I'm currently working with a colleague in Northern Chile where desalinated water is being introduced as part of the water supply and people don't want that because they're water supply they don't consider it as the same water and in McDonald's paper that I've referenced here she talks about how the abundance of water in the environment that's produced by desalination in the context of the United Arab Emirates is changing the culture of water in that country where people are used to very scarce water managing scarce water and now suddenly through desalination water has become abundant and it's changing that relationship in that particular context the second point is thinking about the epistemological dimension that Anna mentioned is thinking about how water is known and studied and measured and represented and questioning some of the hydrological concepts, methods and data that are taken for granted and I've just included one example here of the concept of the watershed through a nice paper by Alice Cohen and Shauna Davidson where they look at what actually a watershed is and they conclude something like it can be the size of a country or the size of a puddle on the sidewalk there's any space into which water drains and they interrogate how that concept is used in policy and to what effect and the third point is really what the concept of the hydro-social cycle is set up to do it's set up to reveal the power relations and politics that are embedded within water and not simply around water not simply water politics but the way in which water is produced in such a way that invades power and political processes so we're always looking at that process of production where water comes from how it's made how it's framed and what the implications of that process are recognising that there are many different realities in water and water is not the same thing to all people and a good example of that is a paper in the special issue in which the hydro-social cycle paper appears by Gabrielle Blow where she talks about different ways of conceiving of major river basins in France according to the interests of the various scientists who led those processes and so one set of scientists for example was very interested in freshwater cross-stations and they looked because of the life cycle of the habitat of the cross-stations that led them to define the river basin in a different way to the other centre scientists who I believe were looking at micro-organisms so these concepts are not necessarily pragmatic they have their history they come from somewhere from particular actors thinking in particular ways in particular historical and geographical contexts and lastly and also quite importantly the hydro-social cycle encourages you to look beyond the water itself and to appreciate the bigger picture and role of power in wider agendas that accompany water so we're very used to looking at the role of politics in water but there's also a role of politics of water in politics as well and trying to avoid self-indulgence self-indulgence an example is from my own work on Chile on their famous water market system a unique water market system and the reform, the attempted reform of that system whereby the discussion about the reform of the system was not really about how to manage water but it was all about preserving the new level programme of which the water model forms part so looking at those power relations that process of production you see a bigger picture that you might not otherwise notice so the last slide trying to sum up what the hydro-social cycle is trying to do and what it's not trying to do so we're trying to move beyond this idea of interactions between discrete humans and discrete water to hydro-social relations whereby the relations are in the water as well as beyond the water so it's not about coupling or integrating hydro-logical systems and social systems for us or about integrating social factors into hydrology even though I think that's a worthy and necessary endeavour but it's looking at how water is produced by social relations in a certain tone water produces those social relations in new ways and how those arrangements are constantly shifting and that's where you start to notice these bigger pictures so it's not a framework for water and society studies per se, it's more a framework for undertaking critical critical ecologies of water so always reflecting how water is constructed and how it's produced how it's known how it invades power and reflects that power through the form that it takes and what's the bigger picture beyond the water itself and the reason for doing this as part of critical critical ecologies of water is to try to inspire, try to pick up those power relations in order to inspire, change, contest those power relations that produce exclusion and this is within a broader motive of the political ecology tradition to avoid sort of problem solving approaches that don't necessarily tackle the underlying causes of issues such as exclusion from drinking water it allows you to challenge, not necessarily effectively but at least try to challenge these causes and try to promote change at a more profound level and just lastly for example working with some colleagues at the moment on the concept of water security and trying to move this towards a much more relational approach and towards security that moves away from securing the quantity of water for the people shifting the hydro-social relations that underlie that exclusion in the first place so thank you thank you very much good afternoon everyone it's always a pleasure for me to come to IHE and I see that audience like this IE I've made a lot of pleasure so thank you for inviting me to this interesting debate I want to start by presenting this quote because I have disappeared the presentation by Jessica and I know what you've been thinking because we come from very different perspectives and sometimes we don't know something we don't know how to even say and also the language is a major issue so we have come from very different perspectives some of the words that I've heard in Jessica's talk I don't have any understanding of the meaning of their meanings so I'm really far off so I think that's where we are in this debate and so we call it the debate between myself and Jessica and really it's going to be a debate in each one of you in your own minds the debate is going to be in you because I don't think that I can debate sufficiently enough here with my lack of knowledge and understanding of the opposite field but actually I can enlighten you I can only present what I know in my own language and I know that from my knowledge of IHE many of you are working in the middle and therefore you will be able to help us debate this better than we can debate ourselves so I'm hoping that at the end of the presentation that there will be questions and discussions that will help the debate to move along okay so I need to give you a little history so my involvement in this started about 2010 before 2000 when I was you can call me pretty rigorous physical hydrologist it's only after I moved to the US you mentioned you heard that I worked on the popular this is an investigation initiative that is over and then I was thinking what should I be doing in the future and I moved to the United States and figured that we need to be with people we need to dream with people and so I organized a series of meetings and discussions and the first outcome of that was this paper but it appeared in water sources research and I should tell you a story water sources research in many people's minds is the premier journal in hydrology it started in 1965 when it started in 1965 the founders of the journal who saw Vice they were going to be two editors one from the social sciences one from the natural sciences so water line line was a physical hydrologist and either means of an economist they were the two joint editors when they started the first paper that ever appeared in the journal was by Ted Arrow Nobel Prize winning economist the first paper ever appeared in the journal but hydrology should be of wisdom in the 1990s decided involving social sciences was detrimental to the science and they made a decision to remove that initial practice social sciences were removed and they haven't been back since so what we are trying to do is to bring the humans back into the hydrology cycle that's one of these stories I want to tell you I'm writing a textbook right now on hydrology one of the first things that we removed from the book was the hydrology cycle we don't present the hydrology cycle anymore because all of you have done a hydrology class the first lecture is the hydrology cycle it's just presented as a motherhood statement we never come back to it it's never used it's just presented it's the holy reign of hydrology it's never used so we decided to remove it so part of this paper is this picture so I was in this nice forested land all the work that I had done in my life was in nice christian environments looking at what happened to the hydrology what had to rain for when it falls to the ground on the right hand side this is what the scientists are doing this is from the millennium report so there is a long table in this paper we try to contrast the old hydrology to what should be the new hydrology I just picked only two items the old hydrology is where humans are external to the hydrology system and then what the way that we do research and study systems is to observe and analyse pristine places and then finally we try to correlate to make predictions with humans involved that's the traditional view the new view that we are trying to propagate in this paper that humans are interested to the system both as agents of change and as beneficiaries of the services the system provides and if the approach to studying hydrology is to observe and analyse real places where real people live with the hydrology system so I just want to contrast between the two of them and between this paper we had a whole series of further discussions and community and we came up with this we came up with a white paper in 2011 and part of the recommendation of the white paper is actually that there is a need for a new field of photo hydrology to bring humans back into the hydrology system and you heard already that we looked at it as a system where we studied the dynamic two way interactions and feedback between water and people that's hydrology anything less is not hydrology now this is a medical statement but I just presented it because the idea for evolution that you this can apply to traditional hydrology you have the hydrology hydrological processes operating in many different timescales but you can think of it as an ecological system you can think of trees they have their own dynamics and they can interact and feedback on each other and so once you see the river and observe in a river basin river flow hydrology system rate falls whatever relationship between rate fall and on off but really actually it's not the case it's really an emergent outcome at the very least two different dynamic systems operating in very different timescales interacting together so river flow that you see is not the physical outcome of what I'm going to say rate falls is really in fact between the hydrology and the ecology at the very least now you can extend that now that we have put people in there as an interactive feedback between the hydrological system or hydrological system and the social system so social processes operating in very different timescales hydrological or natural processes operating in very different timescales interacting together creating the voided pirates imagine a meandering river a meandering river is a revolution if it is revolution nobody knows why the river is meandering so that itself is a revolution now you have on the right hand side two system co-evolving together interacting and providing an emergent outcome runoff for example as an example is an outcome emergent outcome so in social hydrology when you are dealing with co-evolving, a couple of co-evolving systems they need emergent outcomes, emergent phenomena so social hydrology as a science the subject matter of the science is the phenomena that arise emerge out of these couple of systems emergent phenomena so when we do science we go out we first recognize phenomena and then we ask the question how do they come about based on discovering how they came about you build knowledge understanding and hopefully contribute to your theory of the science that is what happens so if you see in the last five years we have been only in operation in five years what we have been doing is looking at phenomena that arise in the real world so here is an example of water management and agriculture system so you have demand, people need water for agriculture it is supplied from nature so you use the supply to satisfy the demand but obviously that is not as easy as it is so you need an infrastructure you need a well or you need a pump you need infrastructure you need also governance so when you put all of these things together they are part human part natural, they are interacting together they produce emergent phenomena what is an emergent phenomenon emergent phenomena you have a lot of water projects water management projects all over the world happening as you speak some of them are successful, some of them are failures some of them are successful for a while and they become failures later so successful failures come all the time it is a dynamic behind itself so that is a phenomenon when you do something and it fails because you did not anticipate that is a failure that is a phenomenon when there are unintended consequences or something that you did you did something for this purpose what you get is something else you solve a problem here you create a new problem that is an unintended consequence that is a phenomenon, how did that happen is it because there is not enough water not enough demand or is it because something else on the infrastructure side or on the governance side you did not anticipate so I am going to give you examples as we have been studying in the last few years I am not going to claim that we are 50 years of research under our wings to say that we have a new science but we are just starting and set these up as an example just illustrate how this thing works so I just started with this example of the Kissimmee river in Florida those of you who are known to Orlando Disney World, you know this river I see two pictures here there is a meandron river this white shape here actually what happened was in the 1950s 40s it was already a meandron river they stayed in it because they wanted to reduce the line that cost them billions of dollars I think billions of dollars but 50 years later they re-meandered another billion dollars this is what happened in the last few years because 50 years ago they wanted to save them from flooding save ourselves themselves from flooding 50 years later brief people moved into the Orlando area they did not care about flooding they wanted a nice environment back they were more powerful you talk about power dynamics the people in Orlando are more powerful than the people in the rural areas of the river basin they were more powerful, they were able to impose their will and this happened so one mistake for a panel in 50 years time that is an ultimate consequence that is an emergency phenomenon and the active companies are over in favor of this the more of it now the example only two examples I present is the the one I got introduced to first time is the Manadaling River Basin we have 100 years of history of agricultural development and cutting the story short you know 50 years what we call a pendulum swing so something was happening that was happening in time and also in space so and I want to go into a lot of detail because there is a lot of theory and equations behind it but you know what to use kept on going on because people were extracting water from the river using it to irrigate extracting land, produce output they kept on doing it but they were not realizing the system was so you know stuck into that mode of extracting more and extracting more water and extracting more land and keep on going the water ran out there was no water flowing down to the southern ocean environment suffered and then community keep back that can't be right and then impose their will the community as a group impose their will to turn back so that was an example of a pendulum swing and I only presented this picture here just to tell you that as a hydrologist for a sudden moving into this we model the system, the dynamics there are five equations here five differential equations that are possible the main point I want to say here is out of the five equations there is only one hydrology equation so in order to understand the system why it happened you need more than hydrology you need democracy you need ecology you need social style so we actually model the social aspect the state variable called environmental awareness in other words this is what people in the community feel about the environment how much they value it to the point that they actually force the system to turn around but that's the social variable we model by equation I don't know how many social scientists will accept that but that's the way that we do our business so but I think at the very least I agree to you that I accept that hydrology is just to solve all the problems we need more than hydrology you really understand what happens in very much so this is the dynamic I don't know how much time we have so this is how it works so you have water being extracted more and more in the first picture A as you take water out the environment slowly decreases less and less water flows down the stream that begins to impact on the environment in terms of the wetlands so the Willemons as you call them in Australia they dry out and then that dry out environment begins to be set in the community in the form of this environmental awareness when that kicks up that forces the system the political system, the government system to turn this down so they make decisions I don't want to go to the detail but that's exactly what happens to and around so we looked at this from the point of view of a positive force productive force and a restorative force like the Ying and the Yang and that mediated this positive and the negative is mediated by people because we otherwise have to do all these things so that was mediated by this environmental awareness so so remember we started with two ways he passed water and people at the time when we started it I didn't know the word values and norms and I'm not a social scientist I'm a pure hydrologist and engineer I was learning along the way and people told me social scientists that I was working with yeah these values and norms were on the pin what people do and what is normally accepted used in many decisions like in water resources management they assume that these values and norms that you have about everything are fixed yeah this is what you read but if you think of water or environment these states or failures are different but fixed but what we learned is that those values and norms are themselves changeable they change with people's lived experiences so as you do something to do something to gain something you gain another inherited consequence that begins to be fed into the community it changes the values and that changes what you do so it goes round and round it reduces social perspectives directly in the formal values and norms this is how far we have come so far in social harmony that doesn't mean that that's where we start but we are learning because most of the work that is done here unfortunately is done by natural scientists claiming to be social scientists so after doing these experiments I was really pleasantly surprised pleasantly surprised there was a paper that appeared in TLA just two years ago now my colleague who is the author of this they said exactly the same thing that culture has to be acknowledged where is the norms yeah so we have now absorbed that into our line of thinking so that is all I want to say so you got from me a history of where we started from and we are now I just want to give you a perspective because most of the work this is only five years and so you can always expect same kind of products but I was pleasantly surprised now we have a special issue in water resources research water resources research we have a special issue now running it's almost finished now you won't believe this but when we made a call last year we were expecting about 10 papers 90 papers have been submitted 90 there is a rejection rate of 70 percent so quite a few papers have been rejected but we are happy there will be about 40 papers left over left behind and they will be published and I looked at the titles of the papers that have been submitted they are from a wide group of people so the field is actually broadening it's not me who is actually running this there is a wide group of people including many many sources of studies there is a lot of opportunities so people in the audience you are running your problem and you are complex problem we take problem society is okay because there is a lot to learn so this is the kind of titles 90 papers and I will be commentary so the field is actually becoming more and more healthy especially in thoughts of a wide range of ideas and morals and data so I feel very happy but there is a long long way to go so this is just a summary so in the five years that we have been around at least one day to be there we have made a lot of progress there is IAHS initially called the panther eye we started after pub so it helps us to propagate this thing around the world and I think that I myself have published a lot of papers just to push the field so I am almost like a travelling salesman missionary so if you want to know more about it there are tons of papers that are published so we are very busy pushing pushing people into the field so I will stop there and look forward to the discussions I guess Anna is going to leave thank you very much so thank you both very much for me there was actually more overlap in the languages and the interests than I was anticipating which is really interesting so maybe there is quite a lot of scope for collaboration and exchange after all now very briefly in the paper that we published we identified a few strength and weaknesses and I think they they came up also in the presentations so the strength of either social or socialising developing a rich understanding or a narrative of the situation social hydrology strength lies in formalising a conceptual understanding of the situation but they both want to take similar things into account in very different ways as well as understanding water in a different way so what we propose in our paper is that actually sequencing would be a really good idea the strength of the hydro-social research lies in this very rich understanding and then the social hydrologies can run with that understanding to do that modelling but the problem with this is that inevitably which you also touched upon when you put capture things in mathematical equations some of the richness of the situation the plurality of the understandings the plurality of the values and norms are lost because what is a failure of a project who says it's a failure maybe it's a success for some people and a failure from others and if you start modelling richness is lost so it's very difficult to take account of human agency human decision making, chance and art dependency in modelling so that's a very brief summary of what I think we heard so then I would like to ask the two presenters to briefly reflect on these two questions what do you think you can productively collaborate or exchange or even integrate ideas and what do you think the water managers of the future needs to take home do you want to go first? oh stick it here okay maybe I don't have to stand up the microphone is on so you can just leave it here that's fine for collaboration integration I think that as you heard already the gulf between the two presentations is very vast so to bridge that gulf there has to be a lot of effort because you have to cross a lot of obstacles even from our own disciplines because as I already mentioned to you we went through these ones and WRR kicked out the social scientists because it's developed what's the word they used it's that the science is being I don't know the word exactly but my community will not like me if I don't have a lot of mathematics in the paper that I present or Siva is going soft nothing wrong with that but I'm saying that we have our own barriers in our own fields who judges our work our community have to judge our work I declare that I'm a scientist my evaluation comes from my fellow scientists and I'm able to come here and present this because I'm old enough that I don't depend on somebody's money and approval but you would have a hard time getting a younger hydrology to come and give this presentation because so there are a lot of barriers number one that's disciplinary barriers the other is communication barrier that we need to cross what do we mean by you said values what is that thing because I cannot just write a paper and do something, some science research by saying values and do nothing about it so I have to bring it in somehow as a quantity that I model and so on so there are a lot of challenges like that and so I have done also a lot of collaborations with eco hydrologists because I've been with eco hydrologists for a while so I think that to move forward we need people both are willing to work together accept differences respect each other because without respect nothing will move so and help each other help because and I've been very fortunate with social scientists who would give me ideas like values and norms and you know feelingly and said this is the way to go if you do it you will make progress and so and don't criticize me for making a mistake because people can easily say you know this is nonsense in fact I was accused on the one hand I'm being accused my own community of selling out and I went I gave a talk in Bologna 2014 on social technology and a social scientist from South Africa stood up and accused me of being a militant that I'm doing something that I don't know anything about which is a militant so I think that we need a lot of struggles but my own feeling is that in spite of those things I think we have made a lot of progress I showed you that we have made a lot of progress so I think it's possible just requires a little bit of willingness and I think that's why I'm hoping that the fact that the Gulf is very wide there are people in the middle too and they can be translators and help each other to reflect very briefly on the question too what should this audience take home I think the main thing that I would suggest to them because I think it's also in the work that one of the papers that we published in 2015 on social technology and it resonates with one idea in your paper which is that whatever you're doing management problem somewhere you you said you call it the narrative I call it the phenomenon that you start from there in other words as an engineer I myself you actually always start with the problem that something that is happening that you are unable to understand fully and in order to understand it you need to frame in the right way and the framing of the problem as a hydrologist I will frame the problem as a hydrological problem clearly we've heard that the problem is not hydrological it's social and political and all these things so what we need as managers all of you who are doing PhDs that you frame the problem in as broad a way as possible that you don't miss out something miss out an important element if you miss that out then you all come up with a solution which will lead to an unintended outcome because the important thing has been left out so maybe that's where hydro social research comes in so I give the floor to you for the first question so collaboration integration between the two fields I think it's really good that hydrology is moving more in this direction because it makes total sense I mean I've seen recently a call for research on the effects of climate change on the Chilean Andes which is a region I've worked and the call is just physical they're just interested in rainfall patterns and things like that but if you look at all those river basins where climate change will be felt they're heavily modified with agriculture and mining and forest plantations and things like that just to measure one set of factors and not look at what's happening on the ground it makes no sense I think it's really good that hydrology is making that direction and by the same token I mean it's very disappointing that some of your colleagues have such a negative attitude to not being proper science as any social scientist here will know these kind of things for years you're not doing proper science doing interviews isn't a proper method and things like that I mean it's good that we've got champions like yourself trying to promote change within especially the harder science disciplines as for kind of collaboration integration on one level obviously there's a lot of overlap looking at water systems and societies and those kinds of things how they interrelate how they change, how they develop some of those kind of negative feedback loops that you referred to so that's obviously something in common but I think on another level we are trying to do things that are quite different as I see it you're trying to understand the changing environment which is a physical environment with human influences and I'm trying to understand that too but with more emphasis on the social structures and the kinds of societies we have today and why they're uneven and trying to challenge those processes so I've looked at a couple of the papers that you had not your long list of 30 out of 90 titles but the ones before that and my sense is that they are a bit more of a pragmatic problem solving approach trying to inform policy in useful ways and as political ecologists that's not necessarily what we're trying to do we're trying to reframe issues produce new explanations in particular around social change that's linked to the environment and to water and to promote new discourses as a result of those insights so I think there's similarities but also still quite fundamentally different objectives and what should this audience take home from both your proposals well the master students already know because I said already in our little meeting you know for water managers so people like me with this kind of approach you know we're not recommending practical measures you know you can adopt and implement and solve your problems and I'm often asked in the field in the various places where I work well yeah you know I like your analysis but what's the solution what's your solution to this which usually I don't have an answer and so for water managers it's about trying to at least give an idea that there are different ways of thinking about things and that thinking about things in a slightly different way might throw up understandings and insights that you might otherwise not notice and this is the thing about not taking water for granted I mean if I'm a water manager and I want to solve drinking water problems I might think well I'll just install a desalination plant but then you know if my population doesn't want to drink desalinated water because they've heard it's dangerous you know whatever you know that doesn't necessarily solve my problem so it's about having a wider understanding of things and trying to appreciate some of the complexity of social dynamics around water thank you very much now I realise if you haven't been looking at these kind of theories before it's a lot to take in I do think that both presenters made a really big effort to stick to the main lines of their ways of working so I'm hoping that in the audience some people also have formulated their own answers to these questions from having listened to the presentations and from now heard the speakers answers to these questions so you're going home when you finish your studies what have you learnt from these two approaches how are you going to take this into your practice is there someone who would like to say something about it you can also say I don't like one or I don't like the other that's also fine but maybe you can then explain why or maybe you say this is not useful or that's not useful can we have some reflection from the audience of how these two approaches might work for them how about you boxing talking that's how it works you had to put a question in it it's a microphone thanks a lot for the presentation very interesting and yes I'm just going to say that of course I am an engineer because I don't remember much more into the ideologies side the first presentation was a little bit difficult to understand actually for me and regarding the first question of collaboration I feel that maybe we have to do the next step of trying to reach out to other people and trying to to see if you can start working with somebody from social science that's also what I'm trying to do here in IHC for example maybe try to write something about what the problems with social scientists for example a lawyer I have the experience right now so I am trying to write something with a lawyer and it's a huge challenge for me that's one of the things that I realized because normally I'm not used to that kind of language I think we have to do that next step trying to improve collaboration in that regard and yeah someone else thanks to both of you for a nice presentation I'm a PhD fellow from Motor Covenant's shared group I like both of your presentations but the thing that strikes me most is that equation how you try to quantify environmental awareness simple to me looks like a little bit Hebrew equation so I would like to know about both of your personal opinion on quantifying such an intangible issue like environmental awareness with the numbers you voted Jessica first to be fine should we sponsor those two so the engineer who's trying to work with lawyers and the like I think one of the good things about social hydrology is that it is trying to move beyond that traditional interdisciplinary approach which we've had for quite a long time where on an endeavor project or something you have a hydrologist doing hydrology an anthropologist doing anthropology and trying to mix those things I think what's good about social hydrology is that they are really trying to integrate social factors into the hydrology itself so I think that's good I think that's in advance on your question about the quantitative I must say I didn't understand the equation for awareness I did look at it I didn't understand any of them not even the one that appeared to be more simple the awareness one as a social scientist I'd never represent something like that because that's not my language my tradition I said before I had seen a couple of papers on social hydrology and one of my thoughts about it is a lot of it is coming from a systems perspective which is quite in line with natural sciences like hydrology and I think at least what some of these people are doing is not kind of questioning that systems approach because that's kind of what they know and what makes sense and what forms part of their tradition they're going with it and so then you end up with a sort of scenario well this is the systems approach that relies heavily on modelling and quantification so how do we incorporate the social into that so while that's a good approximation I mean there is a as you point out there is a difference there between you know how a systems person has social factors and how a more qualitative social scientist like a sociologist or an anthropologist maybe would approach the social science so I think when you've got over the barriers that you've got over so far I think sort of some thinking about how to incorporate some of the social factors maybe going beyond sort of social factors and processes to some of the other things that I've talked about for example so power and discourse and framing and those kinds of things so what does that equation mean what's actually in it and the question that it raises particularly for me is can you represent the norms and the values or is it more important to represent the range of norms and values and whose norms are more important than someone else's okay good thanks for the question first thing I should say is before we can run we have to walk so we have to start somewhere now the equation that I present there did not come from a social theory somebody said this is the way people behave and therefore we write down the equation from it it's just an intuitive okay it must be this it comes from intuition our intuition may be wrong our intuition was not informed by social theory number one so I just give you an example you ask why did you choose it I give you a different example Juliano de Balthasar who used to be here he modeled the couple human flood system that is his research and in his model also there is a social variable it's called memory memory of a flood so think of a bank account you have a bank account so every time there is a flood you put money in the bank okay so there are more floods money goes into the bank memory of the flood goes into the bank but then a few years of no flood the memory depletes because you forget so that's a simple example so that's how he modeled it so like a memory bank okay floods happen more and more and your bank account goes up and then flood don't happen for a few years you forget your generation forgets and you start building close to the river and then there is a big flood comes and then suddenly you remember again and then you go again so that is an example of an intuition that went into this environmental awareness also number one later we actually improved on that based on some socio-ecological systems later papers that we published we call it community sensitivity now the answer to your question so these things were not fully informed by social theory we are still trying to learn hopefully social scientists in the audience can help us help us with the theories but recently there was a paper published this year actually by people not related to us in Melbourne, Australia they actually published a paper on the same thing values environmental awareness they published a paper they were informed by our paper but they didn't want to cite us so they published a paper 150 years of how people responded to the environment and we were really upset so we just recently submitted a paper to HES explaining that what they discovered based on newspaper articles about people's attitudes to environment because it exactly mirrored what we put in this model environmental sensitivity so we know that what we modeled matches what was observed by newspaper articles independently so how did they make the newspaper articles numerical how did they give number to it I don't remember how but that is the main numbers I mean I don't remember the details but this is New South Wales newspapers for 150 years so it appeared in global environmental change there is a prestigious journal they published this and we were really upset but we suggested a paper comparing our results showing that my god we got it right so our intuition was right but I think we are still calling for social theory to inform us help us better model these things I'm aware that our precious time is running out fast but I think we have the opportunity for at least one if not two more interventions from the audience Hi thank you for your presentation I have more of a question you have discussed about how both fields are similar but the objective is kind of different for each and as an engineer I understand how social aspects can be brought into the more analytical parts but I'm still not clear and I'm curious to know how hydrological aspects are brought to the domain of pure social studies so that would be my question my comment is related can you wait for the microphone my name is Tatiana and I am a staff member here I am trained originally as an anthropologist now I like to think of myself as a human geographer and I have it's a silly anecdote so like the first week that I started working here I went outside there's a bar and I was grabbing a beer and then there were four fellow Latin Americans made staff members on PhDs and they asked me what did I do so I told them I was very happy I had been hired and I started the intersection of Latin electricity in the Colombian Caribbean with stories of exclusion racism and the war in the context of urban growth and they told me we do that too but plus we also molded we also made a lot and they started naming a lot of other things that they do that they did but yeah we also incorporated that in our models and I have more ideas to reply but then this time I have realized what stroke me about the comment we don't do the same the goal is different and that is perhaps what sometimes is debatable between the two now we do the same too we also incorporate that in our models through numbers and operationalization of variables so we do incorporate all that through intuition for example because we know how every country works so that will be like my comment on both ways of doing things and how the social is very broad and I like what Jessica said it's not perhaps the same goal like fixing although the point is to change situations that we think are unfair but not finding quick solutions or it's different it's a different way of incorporating the social or thinking about it so I think both speakers can just briefly respond to these two comments and your comment was more to Jessica how can you create a material or how do you do that and then we've heard Tatiana's reflection so a lot of social scientists working on water don't incorporate the hydrology really at all in what they do or if they incorporate it to some extent so some kind of hydrological data for example usually they accept that as given and you know use that as kind of the context of their work I in my own work have engaged a bit more in the hydrology element through essentially a critical analysis of hydrology in terms of how it approaches studying those physical processes which is what I presented at the beginning of my talk how it kind of excludes the social element and I've also looked at it in terms of the politics of using hydrological assessments to determine water allocation so in the context mainly Latin America where I've worked hard sciences privileged over other types of assessment even for quite social situations like water allocation so I sort of interrogated a little bit that view the allocation had to be done by a hydrological model I looked at how the hydrological model was done with the help of an engineer who could read equations if I should point out a lot of help I should also add and what looked to me to be a professional thorough study was actually a mess it used lots of data with huge limitations and it also reinforced social exclusion from water by not looking at the context within which water was allocated where in which there was hoarding by a number of powerful farmers in this case so actually kind of exacerbated that by sort of looking at that as a neutral situation just looking at how much water was there how much could be allocated and through the particular system that was in place ended up allocating what was left after the hoarding to the larger farmers as well so there's two points there that hydrological studies are not always as accurate as they may look that there's a big politics to defaulting to a physical study even where you've got a context of social allocation and also the way in which going straight for that kind of desocialised assessment can actually reinforce exclusion final words to you yeah maybe I'll answer Tatiana's question two points one is even though we dabble in social science whatever in the work that I do we're not trying to co-opt social society and become social scientists ourselves that is not what we're trying to do I mean if you ask me honestly I'm trying to be a better hydrologist that is my goal I don't want to become a social scientist I never wanted to be an ecologist because the social scientist is no more social scientist than me so I don't want to do that I think what we're trying to do is become better hydrologists so that's number one number two yeah Rome was not meeting one day and so even science all the questions in one step that scientific method is actually you have a problem you have a hypothesis phenomenon that you're trying to understand you come up with a hypothesis you formulate the hypothesis in my field you build a model on the basis of the hypothesis make a prediction falsify it, test it against data and if it doesn't work you throw it out step by step learning along the way this is what we will do so none of that you said social science is very broad absolutely and so my answer to that I'm not trying to be a social scientist so address all the social sciences problems related to work I'm trying to help hydrology number one and do it step by step learn along the way and build up to the whole thing and so this is what we're doing and so long as we are not you know crucified for this we can still make progress we can make a lot of progress so I think somebody may ask the question about the modeling in the Florida example we actually modeled power dynamics too we modeled it we connected the values to the power the relative power and modeled it so this is the way that we operate actually the idea of power dynamics was loaded I came from Giuliano actually he listened to our presentation oh that's power dynamics going on he heard it from somewhere else here so I think there's progress that we can make step by step and enrich our own fields my field can be benefit from working with social scientists and presumably social sciences working with water can also benefit from learning hydrological concepts into this for example when Margrethe was there in Annapolis a few weeks ago I made the comment that a lot of social ecological systems people when they deal with water they deal with water that is stagnant you know they call it hydrology but hydrology involves moving water flowing water it has additional moving water so water doesn't stay in one place it moves along so if you want to claim that you are doing social ecosystem with hydrology you have to have moving water so that's a lesson that social scientists can learn from hydrology water moves that has ramifications upstream downstream upstream downstream so that you can learn and you know the California situation this is a beautiful story the California went through a drought they claimed that it's finished during the drought 5-6 years heavy drought the reservoirs all went down the reservoir water level surface water went down the governor imposed you know water restrictions people were penalized for using water for to water the lawns and so on during that drought the farmers they were irrigating wheat but the price of almonds and other things for sky high outside the world they started irrigating throughout the year not through the 3 months of the year irrigating almonds I have a beautiful picture of flooded almond plantation flooded pumping groundwater so groundwater is already depleted but they went ahead and pumped groundwater during a drought to produce almond for the export market which is a good example of water flowing to money water flowing to money absolutely and some of my colleagues are actually modeling that studying that because that's an example of something that hydrolysis never studied before now for us it's a beautiful problem so thank you very much on these very inspiring works I think we heard enough possibilities for collaboration and exchange also she likes your help to understand the hydrological models thank you you like her help to understand power relations and decision making how to model it not yet tiny steps as you said yeah that's right we're looking forward to even better mutual understanding I think this is the place that has to happen I don't know of any other place in the world any other university institution in the world where these two communities can come together in one place I don't know of any other place I'm sorry for overrunning a bit but you were all very attentive so I thought I could afford a few more minutes thank you all for your attention thank you I'm extremely happy that it went I think like in the age of the Anthropocene we cannot afford to be everybody just being in their own groups exclusive we have to really bring up together all the knowledge that we can to solve one of the largest challenges that humanity is facing I think it's a lot to Jessica both for coming and also to Mr. Sibapalan it was amazing to have you here it's just like a really flower-gasted and well we want to thank you this is a small token of appreciation for coming thank you thank you very much and of course there's some complimentary drinks after the talking so you're more than welcome to come and hang out and have a more informal discussion with these amazing speakers so thank you