From Raindrops to a Common Stream: Using the Social-Ecological Systems Framework for Research on Sustainable Water Management

Abstract

Sustainable water management is a growing concern worldwide. Nonetheless, despite the existence of water-related reviews in the business literature, the contribution of organization and management studies to sustainability challenges remains unclear. As systemic approaches are necessary to tackle sustainability challenges, we use Elinor Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework to assess whether and how the current management literature on water contributes to our understanding of sustainable water management. Our review shows that management research is still far from making a significant contribution to this field, because of limited knowledge accumulation and theoretical development, and the lack of integration of environmental factors within social science research generally. The social-ecological systems framework helps us identify future research opportunities that would feed more effectively into a multidisciplinary effort toward sustainable water management.

The Collaborative Process in Environmental Projects, a Place-Based Coevolution Perspective

“…Sharing the lessons learned and exchanging constructive arguments [92,94] on the requests formulated by decision makers and their relations with scientists and knowledge would contribute to the attempt of combining research activities and water governance. Connecting with a public policy perspective' [124] and ecological restoration [115] is expected to help relating environmental outcomes to organizational patterns [19].…”

“…While the promotion of integrated approaches for regulations and scientific knowledge generation is not recent, there are still difficulties in practical implementation. First, the diversity of planning instruments (disjoint relationalities) [18], the variety of organizational forms (distributed responsibilities) [19], and the power asymmetries between stakeholders [20] jeopardize management strategies. Second, the variety of academic disciplines and their related epistemologies present a big challenge for scientists trying to have a systemic approach on the nature-society interfacing [21,22].…”

Bringing the biophysical to the fore: Re-envisioning organizational adaptation in the era of planetary shifts

“…To be sure, there has been a considerable literature on business and the natural environment (for a good overview, see Bansal and Hoffman, 2012), and increasing attention to organizational responsiveness to climate change (Schüssler et al, 2014;Wright and Nyberg, 2017), chemicals, pollution, and material scarcity (Barberá-Tomás et al, 2019;Howard-Grenville et al, 2017;Maguire and Hardy, 2009), and biodiversity and natural habitat conservation (Baudoin and Arenas, 2020;Lahneman, 2015). However, organizational scholars, trained as we are to conceive of the world as constructed and hence as least partially governed through social orders-cultural, normative, regulative and legitimating meaning systems 1 -have tended to represent biophysical systems as they most proximately show up to organizational stakeholders-that is, as cultural expectations, industry norms, regulatory requirements, or actions expected as part of a "social license to operate.…”

Current urban development and future urban water deficit: How centrality and maturity affect predicted droughts?

“…Large-n and global datasets on urban water have started providing an idea of the order of magnitude of urban water deficits, and what the supply-demand gaps could be under different scenarios (Appendix A). So far, the global perspective on urban water deficit has mostly focused on short term analysis (<10 years) and emphasized particular policy instruments to cope with shocks, such as pricing strategies, demand management, education, water rights allocation and sectoral-specific water programs (Baudoin and Arenas, 2018;Liu and Jensen, 2018;Richter et al, 2013;Wong and R. R. Brown, 2009). Yet, such research often ignores the role of context in assessing urban sustainability (Swann and Deslatte, 2018).…”