When water crises strike, the most pressing question isn't just about engineering—it's about who gets to decide what resilience truly means.
Imagine two communities facing the same severe drought. One implements strict water rationing that disproportionately impacts small-scale farmers. The other develops a diversified water strategy that protects vulnerable populations while ensuring supply. The difference lies not in their technical solutions, but in who held the power to define "resilience" in the first place. This is the central insight of a groundbreaking approach known as the power-sensitive resilience framework for social-hydrological systems, which reveals that water resilience is never a purely technical problem—it's always a social and political one.
For decades, terms like "flood resilience," "river resilience," and "water resilience" have become powerful justifications for policy goals in the water sector 3 . The concept of resilience itself—often defined as "the capacity to persist in the face of change, to continue to develop with ever changing environments"—has gained significant traction across numerous fields 5 .
Traditional approaches to water resilience often focused primarily on technical infrastructure and hydrological modeling. While these provide invaluable insights into water dynamics, they frequently miss a crucial dimension: the complex interplay between water and society 2 .
A substantial body of literature has begun questioning resilience thinking's natural science roots and alleged conservatism, criticizing it for not adequately addressing power issues 3 . As one research team notes, there's a recurring problem: "Resilience-thinking embraces complexity in water–society relations but misses power" 4 .
In response to these limitations, a team of researchers developed a power-sensitive resilience framework that fundamentally changes how we approach water challenges 3 9 . This framework structures the critical literature into five essential questions that must be addressed when applying the resilience concept to social-hydrological systems:
Which parts of the system are we focusing on?
Are we considering household, community, or basin level?
What specific threats or disturbances matter?
What are the underlying goals?
What makes this approach revolutionary is its insistence that these are never neutral technical questions—they are inherently political choices with significant consequences for different groups in society 3 .
| Dimension of Power | How It Operates | Example in Water Management |
|---|---|---|
| First Face (Visible) | Decision-making in clear, observable conflicts | Voting on water infrastructure projects |
| Second Face (Agenda-Setting) | Controlling what issues get discussed and what alternatives are considered | Keeping certain water allocation discussions off public meeting agendas |
| Third Face (Shaping Preferences) | Influencing what people see as normal, natural, or possible | Promoting technical solutions as inherently superior to community-based water management |
To understand how this power-sensitive framework operates in practice, consider a participatory socio-hydrological modeling approach applied in Thamesmead, London 2 . This case study exemplifies how making power dynamics explicit can transform flood management.
The process began by identifying diverse stakeholders across different sectors and communities, specifically including groups traditionally marginalized from technical water discussions 2 .
The approach intentionally combined scientific expertise with local stakeholder knowledge, creating a space where both technical data and lived experience were valued as crucial forms of evidence 2 .
Researchers and stakeholders collaboratively built a quantitative model analyzing interactions between flood risk and different urban subsystems (infrastructural, economic, social, ecological) 2 .
Together, they explored how different definitions of resilience would lead to varied policy preferences and outcomes, explicitly discussing who would benefit from each approach 2 .
The Thamesmead case yielded transformative insights that extended far beyond conventional flood modeling:
The results revealed "the added value provided by the combination of scientific and stakeholder knowledge in tailoring the model to the case study" 2 . This integration allowed researchers to "offer decision-makers actionable insights into the multifaceted nature of flood risk and resilience" that would have been impossible through technical analysis alone 2 .
Specifically, the project demonstrated the ability of Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) to provide not only hydrological benefits but also multiple social and environmental "co-benefits," especially when coupled with well-functioning grey infrastructure 2 .
| Aspect | Traditional Approach | Power-Sensitive Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Hydrological dynamics and engineering solutions | Interplay between water, society, power, and infrastructure |
| Stakeholder Role | Passive recipients of solutions | Active co-creators of knowledge and strategies |
| Definition of Resilience | Technical capacity to bounce back | Social-hydrological capacity to adapt and transform |
| Power Consideration | Unacknowledged or seen as external to planning | Central to analysis and explicitly addressed |
| Success Metrics | Reduction in flood frequency/volume | Multiple benefits across social, ecological, and hydrological domains |
Implementing a power-sensitive resilience framework requires both conceptual and methodological tools. Here are essential components from the researcher's toolkit:
Analyzes feedback loops between human and water systems
Moves beyond one-way impacts to capture dynamic interactions 7
Engages stakeholders in mapping complex causal relationships
Makes mental models explicit and democratizes knowledge creation 2
Distinguishes between absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities
Allows nuanced analysis of different types of resilience 4
Maps different dimensions of power across stakeholders
Makes invisible power dynamics visible and amenable to discussion 3
Analyzes how resilience operates across different scales
Prevents optimizing for one scale at the expense of others 3
The power-sensitive resilience framework represents far more than an academic exercise—it offers a practical pathway toward more equitable and effective water governance. By making the political choices embedded in resilience definitions explicit, this approach "enables negotiation or contestation on how resilience is defined and used" 3 .
This is particularly crucial as we confront increasing water uncertainties from climate change, population growth, and aging infrastructure 2 . The framework allows us to move beyond resilience as simply "bouncing back" toward what some scholars term "bouncing forward"—transforming water governance systems into improved states rather than returning to potentially problematic pre-existing conditions 4 .
This transformative potential is captured in the concept of hydrosocial system resilience, which recognizes water as never simply a neutral resource but always shaped by and shaping social relations, power dynamics, and cultural values .
The next time you hear about a "water resilience" initiative, ask the five power-sensitive questions: Resilience of what? At what scale? To what? For what purpose? And most importantly—for whom? The answers might reveal more about our social structures than our water systems.