Wicked but worth it: student perspectives on socio‐hydrology

Issues concerning water security plague agricultural, residential, and industrial sectors worldwide, despite advances in the understanding of biophysical water system processes.Proposed solutions to water challenges have been inadequate because they do not account for the dual role of humans as both contributing to and subsequently adapting to problems.This reality has motivated researchers to consider human decision-making and activities as endogenous to water system dynamics (Thompson et al., 2013;Vogel et al., 2015).Sivapalan et al. (2012) introduced the concept of socio-hydrology as a 'new science of people and water' to meet this challenge.Socio-hydrology aims to broaden the study of water cycle dynamics to include social processes.This is similar to the field of ecohydrology, which incorporates ecological processes.However, unlike ecohydrology, which involves incorporation of social processes, which many consider fundamentally different from processes tackled traditionally by natural scientists and engineers.Rittell and Webber (1973) define 'wicked problems' as problems with unknown or indeterminate scope and scale for which there may be no definitive formulation or optimal solutionspecifically problems of social policy and planning.It is possible to conceptualize sociohydrology as a science that wrestles with wicked problems.Socio-hydrology does not possess a precise set of principles or testable hypotheses characteristic of physical sciences but advocates a holistic approach to examining water system challenges through inclusion of social processes (Lane, 2014;Troy et al., 2015;van der Zaag et al., 2014).It is therefore challenging to unambiguously articulate socio-hydrology's guiding questions and methods, reconcile preferred and available data types, and define what modeling and prediction mean in this new field.However, far from being a deterrent, this wickedness is precisely what attracts and motivates the first generation of young researchers specializing in socio-hydrologythe doctoral student authors of this paper.Student ambitions are practical: Socio-hydrology is both necessary and inevitable.Researchers increasingly acknowledge the importance of incorporating social processes into the study of water resources (Montanari et al., 2015;Rajaram et al., 2015).In the original account of wicked problems, Churchman (1967) states that the decision to wrestle with the whole rather than part of a problem is fundamentally a moral decision.Students have witnessed the rise of sustainability research in the water, climate, and environmental sciences, along with the shortcomings of that research in connecting with human decision-making, management, and policy.Tackling the whole of the problem, despite its challenges, is the most appropriate way to acknowledge and address the needs of the communities we claim to serve.This commentary distills PhD student perspectives on socio-hydrology, its challenges, and ways forward.Our discussion is informed by an anonymous 30-question survey designed by the two lead authors to evaluate perspectives and obtain insights on the practice of socio-hydrology from a first generation of student socio-hydrologists.The PhD students who completed this survey had at least 1 year of experience conducting socio-hydrological research at the doctoral level (we invited 25 PhD students to participate, and 16 PhD students completed the survey -13 co-authors and 3 acknowledged contributors).