Bridging waters and power: Hydrosocial territories with socio-natural resilience in China's Great Yangtze River protection programme

Global water governance has increasingly focused on resilience as a means to manage cross-scale complexity and change. In this paper, rather than proposing a rigid new framework, we integrate the concept of socio-natural resilience into the analysis of hydrosocial territories to interpret the complex governance transformations in China. Using field data from the Great Yangtze River Protection Programme (GYRPP), this study illustrates how this integrated perspective helps understand the specific mechanisms of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities in water governance. We argue that the continuous reconfiguration of hydrosocial territories is not merely a technical adjustment but a political process involving the commodification of nature and the tension between state control and market mechanisms. By engaging with critical hydropolitics, we further reveal how these processes reflect broader transboundary power asymmetries, where upstream-downstream interactions are shaped by hydro-hegemonic configurations. Furthermore, socio-natural resilience reconfigures power relations in hydrosocial territories by constructing absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities, thus achieving the continuous transformation and socio-natural (re)production of hydrosocial territories. We highlight that hydrosocial territories with socio-natural resilience are integral territories that integrate technological, physical, social, and natural spaces and relations. Crucially, this study analyzes how actors navigate these spaces—from local river chiefs managing bureaucratic pressure to provinces negotiating the price of clean water—revealing that resilience is deeply embedded in power dynamics and hegemonic struggles. • Socio-natural resilience provides an integrated lens for water governance. • Hydrosocial territory reconfiguration is a highly political process. • Power asymmetries and hydro-hegemony deeply shape transboundary interactions. • The GYRPP achieves socio-natural resilience through three specific capacities.