Co-evolutionary Perspective of Water Management in a Changing World

We present a co-evolutionary view of water management, revolving around feedbacks between environmental and social processes in coupled human-water systems and operating across different time scales. This brings to the fore an emphasis on emergent phenomena in these changing water systems. A suite of real world case studies related to water management in different contexts is used to illustrate these and to explain how they may have come about. They include the levee effect, the pendulum swing, and the irrigation efficiency paradox. Socio-hydrologic modeling carried out as part of many of these case studies indicated that changing human norms and values and uncoordinated governance actions between actors in different sectors played a key role in the emergence of these phenomena. We make the case for a plurality of co-evolutionary models, from stylized to comprehensive system-of-system models, to assist strategic water management for long time scales through facilitating stakeholder participation, exploring the possibility space of alternative futures, and helping to synthesize observed dynamics in a wide range of case studies.