Acting, predicting and intervening in a socio-hydrological world

摘要

This paper asks a simple question: if humans and their actions co-evolve withhydrological systems (Sivapalan et al., 2012),what is the role of hydrological scientists, who are also humans, within thissystem? To put it more directly, as traditionally there is a supposedseparation of scientists and society, can we maintain this separation associo-hydrologists studying a socio-hydrological world? This paper arguesthat we cannot, using four linked sections. The first section draws directlyupon the concern of science-technology studies to make a case to the(socio-hydrological) community that we need to be sensitive to constructivistaccounts of science in general and socio-hydrology in particular. I reviewthree positions taken by such accounts and apply them to hydrologicalscience, supported with specific examples: (a) the ways in which scientificactivities frame socio-hydrological research, such that at least some of theknowledge that we obtain is constructed by precisely what we do; (b) the needto attend to how socio-hydrological knowledge is used in decision-making, asevidence suggests that hydrological knowledge does not flow simply fromscience into policy; and (c) the observation that those who do not normallylabel themselves as socio-hydrologists may actually have a profound knowledgeof socio-hydrology. The second section provides an empirical basis forconsidering these three issues by detailing the history of the practice ofroughness parameterisation, using parameters like Manning's n, inhydrological and hydraulic models for flood inundation mapping. This historysustains the third section that is a more general consideration of one typeof socio-hydrological practice: predictive modelling. I show that as part ofa socio-hydrological analysis, hydrological prediction needs to be thoughtthrough much more carefully: not only because hydrological prediction existsto help inform decisions that are made about water management; but alsobecause those predictions contain assumptions, the predictions are onlycorrect in so far as those assumptions hold, and for those assumptions tohold, the socio-hydrological system (i.e. the world) has to be shaped so asto include them. Here, I add to the "normal" view that ideally our modelsshould represent the world around us, to argue that for our models (and henceour predictions) to be valid, we have to make the world look like our models.Decisions over how the world is modelled may transform the world as much asthey represent the world. Thus, socio-hydrological modelling has to become asocially accountable process such that the world is transformed, through theimplications of modelling, in a fair and just manner. This leads into thefinal section of the paper where I consider how socio-hydrological researchmay be made more socially accountable, in a way that is both sensitive to theconstructivist critique (Sect. 1), but which retains the contribution thathydrologists might make to socio-hydrological studies. This includes (1)working with conflict and controversy in hydrological science, rather thantrying to eliminate them; (2) using hydrological events to avoid becominglocked into our own frames of explanation and prediction; (3) being empiricaland experimental but in a socio-hydrological sense; and (4) co-producingsocio-hydrological predictions. I will show how this might be done through aproject that specifically developed predictive models for makinginterventions in river catchments to increase high river flow attenuation.Therein, I found myself becoming detached from my normal disciplinarynetworks and attached to the co-production of a predictive hydrological modelwith communities normally excluded from the practice of hydrological science.