Tales from the riverside: What community stories can tell us about sustainable water resources management practices

The integrity of renewable freshwater resources is critical for ensuring sustainable futures. Developing strategies to mediate and encourage symbiosis between the dominant discourses of sustainable water resources management and indigenous knowledge and practice is essential. This paper asserts that storytelling plays a central role in the way that people understand and articulate their lifeworld: the people, values and actions that make sense to them. Empirical fieldwork, undertaken within three interconnected riparian communities, captures these community stories to reveal the nuanced ways experiential learning and community action enact sustainable local water resources management at the riverside. Paying closer attention to community stories could enable those involved in dominant sustainability discourses not only to critically engage with indigenous knowledge and practice, but also to provide opportunities to find ways to seed these stories with the wider big history perspective so essential to supporting sustainable futures, and water resource integrity, over the long term.