اهمیت یادگیری اجتماعی و فرهنگ برای مدیریت پایدار آب

Currently water resources management is undergoing a major paradigm shift. Water resources management has a strong engineering tradition based on controlling environmental problems with technical solutions. The management of risks relied on the ability to predict extremes and limit their impact with technical means such as dikes, dams and reservoirs. In this paradigm, belief systems, human attitudes and collective behaviours are perceived as external boundary conditions and not as integral part of management. However, the situation has started to change dramatically. Over the past years, integrated water resources management has become the reigning paradigm. The importance of governance and cultural adaptation has become a major issue of concern. At the same time, there is a paucity of adequate scientific concepts that would allow addressing these issues. This paper introduces a concept for social learning developed in the European project HarmoniCOP and discusses its implications for the cultural and institutional context of water resources management. It aims to contribute to the new paradigm of integrated resource management by discussing the importance of processes of culture and social learning for environmental resources management, in general, and water resources management, in particular.

Contemporary problems in water resources management and resources management in general, are characterized by increasing complexity. Uncertainties due to climate and global change and changing socio-economic conditions provide new challenges that cannot be tackled within the established management paradigm which relies on a command and control approach. In this paradigm, regulatory authorities implement technical (often end-of-pipe) solutions to narrowly defined environmental problems based on expert advice. Presently there is a growing awareness, in particular in developed countries, of the need for integrated approaches that simultaneously take a whole range of trade-offs into account and that involve stakeholders in the whole management process.

There is a growing recognition that in order to address adequately current environmental problems it is necessary to abandon many of the assumptions of the dominant paradigm of resource management about their perceived causes, explanations, and possible remedies and shift toward a more holistic and integrative approach. There is a need to embrace a more systemic understanding of environmental problems which means in practice that remedies must also include basic changes in belief and behaviour systems. We started our argument by noting the current paradigm change in water management. To understand the dynamics of this change and to develop and implement innovative management practices requires new methodological approaches from the social sciences. The current paradigm change in water management can be interpreted as sign of a more general change in societal cultural perspectives. New participatory and adaptive water management approaches will not be implemented in sustainable fashion unless they are more deeply rooted in a cultural change in society. The paper developed the argument that we cannot understand dynamics and transition towards new management regimes without understanding the interdependence between social learning and culture at different scales.