Meeting Description: This workshop aims to develop a more integrated understanding of interactions between water cycles, hydraulic infrastructure, and humans’ individual and collective behaviors. We seek to understand two things: first, creating and identifying analytical frameworks that can integrate our understanding of feedbacks between institutional processes, individual economic choices, and hydrological dynamics on different spatial and temporal scales, and second, identifying areas of progress in the empirical methods available to quantify feedbacks and make predictions.
The importance of water to all human activities has driven many institutional innovations through time, from the Balinese water temple network (1) to Hohokam irrigation canals and modern interstate water compacts (2). In turn, these water-related institutional innovations have driven separate research innovations in hydrology, geography, political science, economics and decision sciences. In the age of the Anthropocene, the feedbacks between policy, behavioral dynamics and resource use have become much more tightly coupled. Compartmentalizing their study is no longer productive. The study of feedbacks between hydrology, individual behavior, collective action and institutions, is beginning under the field of socio-hydrology, but comprehensive integration has remained elusive, in part due to a lack of common concepts, shared language and empirical methods