By Amber Wutich and Jason Loose

Water quality, scarcity, and governance concerns are major global problems, impacting health, economics, and environment in many ways. As regions worldwide struggle to reconcile rapidly expanding population with increasingly overburdened water supplies, the need to address these problems becomes ever more urgent. In the world’s water-stressed areas, understanding local ecological knowledge (that is, what local populations know and perceive about their surrounding resources and ecosystems, including water) can play a role both in the assessment and management of water concerns. Systems of local ecological knowledge often include a very acute sense of resource related problems. With their first-hand perspective, they complement the research of scientists and other experts, yielding a holistic understanding of such problems. Particularly cohesive systems of local ecological knowledge also may include information about sustainable institutions, providing valuable information for resource managers as they study and implement potential governance solutions.

The Global Ethnohydrology Study (http://shesc.asu.edu/research/global_ethnohydrology) is an interdisciplinary multi-year, multi-site study that examines local ecological knowledge of water issues, also known as “ethnohydrology.” The study incorporates perspectives from anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental engineering, and sustainability to explore key research domains such as water institutions, water quality, water sources, and climate change. The study was initiated in Phoenix, Arizona (United States), with funding from the United States National Science Foundation’s Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) and Central-Arizona Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research Project (CAP LTER) programs. The research is now also being conducted in four ecologically, culturally and politically distinct world regions: South America, North America, Europe, and Oceania.

Using the same research protocol in each site, we study perceptions of water issues in the context of increasing urbanization, water scarcity and climate change. In each international site, we follow a two-stage research process. In the first stage, we use an open-ended “successive free listing” technique to elicit information about respondents’ cultural knowledge of water issues. These responses are then compiled and used to develop a structured, closed-ended survey protocol for the second stage of research. In the second stage, we conduct interviews with new respondents to assess their agreement with cultural knowledge about water issues derived from each of the international sites. Using the “cultural consensus analysis” technique, we examine questions such as: (1) Is there a shared core of cultural knowledge around water issues in each site?, (2) Does cultural consensus around water issues vary across international sites?, (3) What kind of people have low or high levels of cultural competence around water issues?, and (4) How closely do lay people’s cultural knowledge of water issues match water experts’ understanding of these issues? Using the same protocol in many international sites enables us to compare how ethnohydrological knowledge varies across countries and cultures.

Currently, the Global Ethnohydrology Study is examining cross-cultural understandings of water institutions, or the rules and norms used to distribute water. This research is being conducted in urban and rural settings in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, England, and the United States. Examples of some of the cultural statements yielded in the first stage of the water institution research are: “Do people have a right to the water they need for drinking and cooking?”; “Should people be punished for using more than their fair share of water?”, and “Should everyone have equal access to water, regardless of whether they live in urban or rural areas?” These questions tap salient issues of water governance across all of the research sites. However, preliminary results indicate that local norms for water access may vary widely across field sites. Over the coming year, we will rigorous test for consensus around local ecological knowledge of water institutions within and across cultures. In future research, we plan to expand the study to address questions of water-borne illness and other water-related health threats. We also plan replicate the study in additional settings in different parts of the world (e.g., Paraguay, Tanzania).