Narratives and water: A bibliometric review. (May 2021) - Leong, Ching
Highlights: Bibliometric review on water narratives shows a rise from 25 in 2000 to 150 today. This approach is most commonly used in Environmental Sciences and Social Sciences. Collaboration is low, creating risk of duplicative research. Narratives can be classified along expert vs local knowledge, and past vs present. Abstract: Social and environmental sciences have shown that narratives have significant impact on human behaviour. Understanding water narratives can therefore help policy-makers understand and regulate public behaviour. We carry out a bibliometric analysis of water narratives, which gives us a broad overview of the types of work, collaborations and key insights. We couple this with a smaller qualitative review, which enabled us to construct a typology that captures the range of themes found in the literature. Narratives might be classified along an axis of expert and local knowledge and an axis of time – retrospective and prospective. We also show that narratives are a useful tool for legitimation and mobilization, and a form of "System 1" heuristic. Given that so many water challenges are tied to human activities, an understanding of water narratives and the link to behavioural change would be a useful part of future research agendas.