Pluralizing Water Knowledge for Inclusive Water Governance: Meaning-making, Co-creation and Transdisciplinarity

This Research Topic is part of a series of article collections published within Frontiers in Water for the the 2nd International Sociohydrology Conference.

The other themes within this series are:
- Participatory and Just Governance: Empowering Local and Indigenous Communities.
- Expanding Sociohydrology: Embracing Spatial Heterogeneity and Emerging Nexuses.
- Comparative Sociohydrology Across Places and Scales: Aiming Towards Synthesis.
- Mainstreaming Sociohydrology: Towards Designing and Implementing Management Interventions.

Watch the Topic Editors discuss the themes of the Research Topics and preview the conference at a recent Townhall: Expanding and Mainstreaming Sociohydrology Toward Transdisciplinary Praxis

Generating knowledge with the potential to advance transformative policies requires the co-involvement of natural and social scientists, policymakers, practitioners, and the local communities that experience most significantly the impacts of water-related challenges and related development struggles. In this context, socio-hydrology can play a crucial role in crafting sustainable water futures that respect and acknowledge site and time-specific particularities and a wide range of perspectives, including those based on lived experiences and intergenerational knowledge. How can we ensure that socio-hydrology is part of the discussion and contributes to more inclusive knowledge-to-action (K2A) pathways and equitable water governance? To answer such question, this theme focuses on:

i) Pluralizing water knowledge through interdisciplinary engagement that combines natural and (critical) social sciences to generate power-sensitive and justice-focussed accounts of hydrological change.
ii) Conceptualizing approaches and empirical examples of knowledge co-creation that recognize the value of different forms of knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, and gendered and local voices, to investigate new causalities and address water-related challenges at multiple scales.
iii) Mapping models and paradigms to break barriers and make science-society work in closer synergy, integrating socio-hydrological and hydrosocial sciences.
iv) Investigating the potential of collaborative interactive governance in conflict-laden transboundary basins.
v) Promoting the role of qualitative insights such as ethnography, visualization techniques, and novel digital/open science means to generate transdisciplinary knowledge.
vi) And finally, acknowledging ways to navigate through and take responsibility for the entanglements between sociohydrological and hydrosocial science and politics.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: water knowledge, water governance, policy making, socio-hydrology, hydrological change, hydrosocial sciences

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.