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

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 science and traditional environmental flow methods to best target implementation barriers. We concentrate on the characteristic ways in which SES frameworks interpret relationships in a system. We make the case for a greater focus on connecting environmental flow applications to broader SES and water management contexts during the design stages of environmental flow programs. We illustrate this with a case study from the Kaiela in south-east Australia. Leveraging SES frameworks and characteristic thinking to complement environmental flows in these early stages can help identify potential barriers and where complementary social science efforts could improve implementation. Rather than expanding the scope of environmental flow assessments, this approach would contextualize them within sustainable water management efforts, forging better links to existing social science disciplines.