Socio-hydrology is an emerging discipline aiming to understand and predict the dynamics and co-evolution of coupled human-water systems. In spite of rapidly increasing interests, there is no mechanistic understanding of how social drivers and social responses interact with the hydrological cycles in a co-evolving human-water system.
This paper proposed a framework for representing the social components of socio-hydrologic systems and interactions among them and with hydrological cycles. The key part of this framework are three interactive elements: societal value change (willingness to change), technological progress (capacity to change) and governance reform (change regulated). In this context, societal value (i.e. culture) is a set of common values, beliefs and attitudes shared by the majority of a regional population on water allocation, technological progress is about technology development on storage, distribution, diversion and use of water. Governance reform refers to formal government reform or self-organising informal institution change relevant to water allocation.
Evolution of social values on water in Australia (1843-2017) and in China (1946-2017), irrigated technology progress in China (8000 BC-1911), and transition of water governance in Australia (1843-2017) and in China (1946-2017) were taken as three examples to describe and measure these three interactive elements. Historical documents (newspapers, technology encyclopedia, and government documents) were used as data sources, text-mining, social network analysis, and mathematical regression were used as the main methods.
These three case studies provided an exploratory approach to understand social drivers and social responses of a human-water system in a measurable way. They enable to integrate these social variables into process-based hydrological models, thus, enable to develop predictive models for how social drivers and social responses interact with the hydrological cycles in a co-evolving human-water system.
An important future research direction is the development of understanding of how societal values, technological progress and governance reform interactively influence water management decision-making in a normative way. This proposed framework and its further developments can be used as a basis for water governance transition toward sustainability.