 |
| Titel |
Acting, predicting and intervening in a socio-hydrological world |
| VerfasserIn |
S. N. Lane |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
|
| Sprache |
Englisch
|
| ISSN |
1027-5606
|
| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ; 18, no. 3 ; Nr. 18, no. 3 (2014-03-07), S.927-952 |
| Datensatznummer |
250120299
|
| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/hess-18-927-2014.pdf |
|
|
|
|
|
| Zusammenfassung |
| This paper asks a simple question: if humans and their actions co-evolve with
hydrological systems (Sivapalan et al., 2012),
what is the role of hydrological scientists, who are also humans, within this
system? To put it more directly, as traditionally there is a supposed
separation of scientists and society, can we maintain this separation as
socio-hydrologists studying a socio-hydrological world? This paper argues
that we cannot, using four linked sections. The first section draws directly
upon the concern of science-technology studies to make a case to the
(socio-hydrological) community that we need to be sensitive to constructivist
accounts of science in general and socio-hydrology in particular. I review
three positions taken by such accounts and apply them to hydrological
science, supported with specific examples: (a) the ways in which scientific
activities frame socio-hydrological research, such that at least some of the
knowledge that we obtain is constructed by precisely what we do; (b) the need
to attend to how socio-hydrological knowledge is used in decision-making, as
evidence suggests that hydrological knowledge does not flow simply from
science into policy; and (c) the observation that those who do not normally
label themselves as socio-hydrologists may actually have a profound knowledge
of socio-hydrology. The second section provides an empirical basis for
considering these three issues by detailing the history of the practice of
roughness parameterisation, using parameters like Manning's n, in
hydrological and hydraulic models for flood inundation mapping. This history
sustains the third section that is a more general consideration of one type
of socio-hydrological practice: predictive modelling. I show that as part of
a socio-hydrological analysis, hydrological prediction needs to be thought
through much more carefully: not only because hydrological prediction exists
to help inform decisions that are made about water management; but also
because those predictions contain assumptions, the predictions are only
correct in so far as those assumptions hold, and for those assumptions to
hold, the socio-hydrological system (i.e. the world) has to be shaped so as
to include them. Here, I add to the "normal" view that ideally our models
should represent the world around us, to argue that for our models (and hence
our 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 as
they represent the world. Thus, socio-hydrological modelling has to become a
socially accountable process such that the world is transformed, through the
implications of modelling, in a fair and just manner. This leads into the
final section of the paper where I consider how socio-hydrological research
may be made more socially accountable, in a way that is both sensitive to the
constructivist critique (Sect. 1), but which retains the contribution that
hydrologists might make to socio-hydrological studies. This includes (1)
working with conflict and controversy in hydrological science, rather than
trying to eliminate them; (2) using hydrological events to avoid becoming
locked into our own frames of explanation and prediction; (3) being empirical
and experimental but in a socio-hydrological sense; and (4) co-producing
socio-hydrological predictions. I will show how this might be done through a
project that specifically developed predictive models for making
interventions in river catchments to increase high river flow attenuation.
Therein, I found myself becoming detached from my normal disciplinary
networks and attached to the co-production of a predictive hydrological model
with communities normally excluded from the practice of hydrological science. |
| |
|
| Teil von |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|