Identifying and Approaching Barriers to Environmental Flow Implementation Using Social–Ecological Systems Thinking

Abstract

Environmental flows are a key tool for ensuring the sustainability of rivers, but successful implementation remains limited. Many barriers to implementation relate to the broader context of water management, social acceptance, or governance. Yet, there remains a disconnect between the social science and biophysical literature on environmental flows. This has led to widespread calls to bring social sciences into environmental flows. However, social science is a wide-ranging discipline and there is no consensus on how its tools and concepts can assist environmental flows implementation. We examine the role of social–ecological systems (SES) and frameworks in guiding the links between social sc..