A transdisciplinary account of water research
Abstract
Water research is introduced from the combined perspectives of natural and social science and cases of citizen and stakeholder coproduction of knowledge. Using the overarching notion of transdisciplinarity, we examine how interdisciplinary and participatory water research has taken place and could be developed further. It becomes apparent that water knowledge is produced widely within society, across certified disciplinary experts and noncertified expert stakeholders and citizens. However, understanding and management interventions may remain partial, or even conflicting, as much research across and between traditional disciplines has failed to integrate disciplinary paradigms due to philosophical, methodological, and communication barriers. We argue for more agonistic relationships that challenge both certified and noncertified knowledge productively. These should include examination of how water research itself embeds and is embedded in social context and performs political work. While case studies of the cultural and political economy of water knowledge exist, we need more empirical evidence on how exactly culture, politics, and economics have shaped this knowledge and how and at what junctures this could have turned out differently. We may thus channel the coproductionist critique productively to bring perspectives, alternative knowledges, and implications into water politics where they were not previously considered; in an attempt to counter potential lock‐in to particular water policies and technologies that may be inequitable, unsustainable, or unacceptable. While engaging explicitly with politics, transdisciplinary water research should remain attentive to closing down moments in the research process, such as framings, path‐dependencies, vested interests, researchers’ positionalities, power, and scale.
Citation
Krueger , T , Maynard , C M , Carr , G , Bruns , A , Mueller , E N & Lane , S 2016 , ' A transdisciplinary account of water research ' , Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water , vol. 3 , no. 3 , pp. 369-389 . https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1132
Publication
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2049-1948Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Description
TK acknowledges funding by the German Excellence Initiative through IRI THESys. GC acknowledges funding from the Austrian Science Funds (FWF) as part of the Vienna Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems (DK-plus W1219-N22).Collections
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