Published online: 21 May 2024
Authors: Elizabeth Macpherson, Rosa I. Cuppari, Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, Holly Brause, William A. Brewer, William E. Grant, Nicole Herman-Mercer, Ben Livneh, Kaustuv Raj Neupane, Tanya Petach, Chelsea N. Peters, Hsiao-Hsuan Wang, Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Howard Wheater
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1734
Abstract:
Global water systems are facing unprecedented pressures, including climate change-driven drought and escalating flood risk, environmental contamination, and over allocation. Water management and governance typically lack integration across spatial scales, including relationships between surface and ground water systems. They also routinely ignore connectivity across temporal scales, including the need for intergenerational water planning. As a global and interdisciplinary group of scientists, we seek to highlight how power and scale dynamics influence and determine water outcomes. We argue that attending to complex water systems challenges requires understanding the function and influence of power at different temporal and spatial scales. Building this understanding is key to designing multi-scalar, reflexive, and pluralistic policy solutions that avoid ineffective or unintended outcomes. We use a co-learning process to reveal important lessons for the challenge of interdisciplinary research and set a pluralist agenda for understanding power and scale in future water governance.
