Enough is enough: how West African farmers judge water sufficiency

What We Know about Water: A Water Literacy Review

“…We were able to find more diverse literature when expanding the search beyond "water literacy" to surveys about water knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, but there is still a strong bias towards western cultures. However, as numerous scholars note, deep cultural and eco-cosmological literacies about water are equally important as an understanding of a concepts like drought index [13,46]. Thus, future research on water literacy should seek greater exploration of non-western water knowledge across a much broader range of settings, with specific attention on developing countries.…”

“…In contrast to this idea is a popular push for a local knowledge. This category encompasses an understanding of local water sources [40,42], water infrastructure [7,18,38,39,41], and current water demands and uses [38][39][40][41]43,44,46,47]. The definitions emphasizing local knowledge do not often overlap with the definitions emphasizing science knowledge, which highlights a key divergence in the literature.…”

“…A local knowledge is deemed more inviting to the general public because it highlights the more relatable and simplified water topics as they pertain to day-to-day life. Within the category of local knowledge, there is a particular focus on knowing where one's water comes from [22,30,38,41,46], with two definitions honing in on the need for familiarity with the watershed one lives in [18,35]. Examples like these convey the importance of context within water literacy.…”

“…The third set of detailed cognitive knowledge we have termed as hydrosocial knowledge because it refers to the bi-directional and continuous interactions between society and water resources. Definitions that fell within this category emphasized how human actions impact water quality and health of water resources, and at the same time, how the health and quality of water resources directly impact human health and welfare [7,18,32,33,35,38,39,46]. Like local knowledge, these topics were also presented in a contextual manner, with authors emphasizing the hydrosocial setting within built environments [7] or the watersheds like those of the Great Lakes [33].…”

“…It is a conative element that highlights knowledge about how to act or use water with a long-term perspective of water resources such that there is still adequate quality and quantity to supply future generations. This includes awareness of how to use water sustainably [42,43,46], how to conserve [30,38,45], and how to protect and/or restore watersheds [35,36]. This knowledge set was the least mentioned among the cognitive domain, with explicit inclusion in only nine of the 26 sources.…”