SUMMARY OF
Cross-Connections:
Linking urban water
managers with
humanities, arts and
social sciences
researchers
Summary of National Water Commission
Waterlines Report, No. 60
Zoë Sofoulis
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney
October 2011
This Document
This document is a summary of a report that was published as a report in Waterlines, a series of
works commissioned by the National Water Commission on key water issues. The research was
undertaken by Dr Zoë Sofoulis as part of a National Water Commission Fellowship project
conducted in 2010-2011: Cross-Connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences Researchers. (Full report at http://www.nwc.gov.au/www/html/3156waterlines-60.asp?intSiteID=1 ) The Commission's Fellowship Program was established in 2007 to
develop future leaders for Australia's water sector by advancing knowledge and building capacity
in the sector.
The Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney
(http://www.uws.edu.au/centre_for_cultural_research/ccr) is a leading interdisciplinary research
centre that emphasizes critical engagement. Combining theoretically directed research with a
practical emphasis on collaboration, CCR researchers work across disciplines, sectors,
communities and sites to generate and empirically test innovative methods of knowledge
production.
Title: Summary of Cross-Connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities, Arts and
Social Sciences Researchers, October 2011
Author: Zoë Sofoulis
Online ISBN: 978-1-74108-238-8
Published by: Centre for Cultural Research,
University of Western Sydney (Building EM, Parramatta)
Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW, 2751.
Date of publication: October 2011
This work is copyright. © University of Western Sydney 2011
An appropriate citation for this document is:
Sofoulis, Zoë 2011, Summary of Cross-Connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with
Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Researchers, Centre for Cultural Research, University of
Western Sydney, Parramatta.
Disclaimer
This paper is presented for the purpose of informing discussion and does not necessarily reflect
the views or opinions of the National Water Commission or the University of Western Sydney.
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
SUMMARY OF
Cross-Connections:
Linking urban water managers
with humanities, arts and social sciences researchers
Zoë Sofoulis
Contents
1. Introduction
2
2. Historical separations, contemporary convergences
3
3. Social research in the water sector
4
4. Water research in the HASS sector
6
5. Key problems encountered
7
6. Collaborative Relationships
8
7. Committed Engagements
10
8. Emerging Research Agendas
11
9. Connecting: symptoms, remedies
12
Acknowledgements
14
Bibliography (Selected)
20
Figure 1: HASS and STEM disciplines
2
Figure 2: Word cloud from bibliography sample
8
2
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
1. Introduction
1.1 Project outline
This document is a summary of the Waterlines Report on the National Water Commission
Fellowship project, Cross-Connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities, Arts and
Social Sciences Researchers, conducted over 2010-2011 by Dr Zoë Sofoulis (Fellow) with Research
Associate Dr Justine Humphry and additional help from Research Assistant Vibha Bhattarai
Upadhyay. The project aimed to research, advocate and facilitate knowledge exchange and
collaborative connections between researchers from the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences,
and government and industry organisations involved in urban water and water services.
Cross-Connections comprised three main parts:

Tributaries: A directory of social and cultural research on urban water (Humphry, Sofoulis and
Upadhyay 2011), which lists approximately 160 researchers and 100 organisations (coded by
industry-friendly keywords), 300 bibliographic entries, and descriptive outlines of sample
projects. Research included surveys, and interviews with 22 social researchers.

Water Managers’ Views on the Social Dimensions of Urban Water (Sofoulis 2010), an
Interview-based study involving 39 water managers and engineering researchers.

Knowledge exchange workshops, Building Enduring Links (10 February 2011, Canberra 16
participants), and Building Collaborative Capacity in urban water (24-25 March 2001,
Parramatta, 38 participants).
The final report (Sofoulis 2011b) drew on all these components and is enriched by many quotes
and tips from participants (indicated by italics), though most are omitted here.
1.2 A note on definitions and terminology
Following Spoehr et al. (2010), the following
abbreviations are used:
HASS - Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and
Medicine (or Mathematics).
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
Figure 1: HASS and STEM disciplines
3
The social sciences (including disciplines of sociology, economics, management, policy studies)
are more familiar to the water industry than the humanities (history, philosophy, art history,
literary studies) or mixed HASS disciplines (such as cultural studies, linguistics, comparative
studies). The huge disparity in status and funding between STEM and HASS sectors, where STEM
gets 95% and HASS 5% of government research funds, is the ‘elephant in the room’
unmentioned by most cross-sector researchers (Spoehr et al. 2010, 13).
1.3 Context – a changing industry
Water professionals observe significant shifts in industry’s role over the last 5-10 years, especially
around issues of water responsibility and communities. The National Water Commission (NWC
2011, 4) identifies three main phases:

Traditional water and wastewater service provision and management – including water
supply, treatment, wastewater collection.

Urban water cycle management – including water harvesting, stormwater collection,
waterway health, flood mitigation.

Liveable cities – regional and urban planning, water-sensitive urban design, liveability.
Water authorities have progressively accumulated new tasks without relinquishing old ones,
leading to possible conflicts between roles (Brown, Keath and Wong 2009). This is socially
significant because each new set of tasks also involves different relations to water consumers, as
proposed by Sofoulis and Strengers (2011):

Historical – provider as benefactor, authority, supplier; user as beneficiary, citizen, (nonresponsible) customer.

Rationalist – provider as manager of resources and demand, efficiency advocate; user as
micro-resource manager, moral (hyper-responsible) customer.

Integrated – provider as integrated (collaborative) planner, supporter of change; user
communities as co-providers, co-managers.
Recent reports by the National Water Commission (2011) and the Productivity Commission (2011)
emphasise customer diversity and choice and urge a step back from blunt user-blaming demand
management tactics with dubious economic and environmental benefits. But in contrast to the
International Water Association’s Cities of the Future vision, they admonish the urban water
industry not to take too much responsibility for creating ‘liveable cities’.
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
1.4 Discussion: Customers and beyond
The Commissions’ reports try to simplify industry’s multiple tasks down to customer servicing, but
fail to account for levels of societal structure beyond individuals. They underplay people’s
altruistic motivations and relations with water, each other, the future, and the planet, which
2. Historical separations, contemporary
convergences
exceed economic behaviour and contribute to adaptive capacity and social sustainability.
2.1 Factors in separation
Urban water services created new kinds of citizens who could enjoy safe drinking water, hot
showers and flushing toilets without personal responsibility for water supply or wastes. Yet the
water sector has managed to appear separate from social concerns. How was this possible?

The disciplinary divide – The STEM / HASS disciplinary divide rationalised delegating natural
resources management entirely to scientific and technical experts.

Strong co-evolved networks – Water systems co-evolved with the people and institutions
who built and managed them, who formed professional cultures that grew ‘increasingly elitist
and distant from mainstream society’ (Turton and Meissner 2000,13).

Statistics and the ‘ABC’ – Modern water systems emerged when statistics were a new tool
of population governance and central to ‘predict and provide’ water planning. Qualitative
methods have been undervalued in favour of marketing approaches like ‘AttitudesBehaviour-Choice’ (Shove 2010), combining psychology, economics and demographics to
focus on individual change and avoid political, social or cultural change.

Disciplines on the move – Only a minority of HASS researchers focus on water, while STEM
researchers sometimes do their own ‘social research’.
2.2 Factors in convergence

Changing character of reality – Conventional disciplinary divides rested on distinctions
between human and non-human worlds that anthropogenic changes in the planet have
eroded, adding complexities that make knowledge of humans and society more relevant.

New roles for water professionals – Complexity demands modes of decision-making and
management beyond traditional engineering repertoires, including multi-disciplinary teams to
find multi-scalar and multi-dimensional solutions. Water authorities are ‘no longer the
kingpins. We’re important influences but we’re not the sole central authority’.
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
5

Changes in training – Urban sustainability demands water utilities become ‘more involved in
environmental management rather than purely water management’, and hire environmental
scientists or environmental engineers with exposure to systems thinking.

Changes in HASS – Areas of humanities and social sciences are shifting to complexity and
systems paradigms, exposing more common ground with new STEM approaches (Anderson
and Braun 2008, Sofoulis 2009).

Changes in culture and communications – New media platforms make it easier for people
to access information and raise community expectations of engagement. Water managers
need social research and engagement because they will ‘just never get a project up’ without
understanding community views, though some prefer to just ‘barrel along’ without research
for fear the findings ‘might make things more complicated’.

Openness to HASS knowledge – Several water managers wanted more involvement with
people from non-engineering backgrounds, to enhance problem-solving capacity through ‘a
diverse set of professionals working together towards a common objective’, and to better
reflect the diverse interests of communities served by water organisations.
3. Social research in the water sector
r
3.1 Why do social research?
The water industry’s general rationale for social research is the imperative to ‘understand and
meet the needs of customers’, though activities involve people outside the customer role, such as
participation in community engagement workshops, negotiations with businesses, working
through education materials, or undertaking ‘citizen science’ (e.g. monitoring waterways).
3.2 Marketing, research, and engagement
Purposes of marketing, research, and engagement
Confusion over the water industry’s expanding tasks is accompanied by confusion over different
relationships to people and communities. These can have different purposes:

Marketing - Finding out what people think about goods and services and trying to
influence their choices; emphasis on surveys.

Social research - conducted from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and methods,
pursuing questions of interest to researchers and/or research users.
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT

Community engagement – ideally, collaborations between governments or institutions and
communities on shared goals; often reduced to invited commentary on proposals.
Although confusion is exacerbated by the way these three activities can overlap and feed into
each other, a key distinction is between community engagement, where ‘you are giving people
choices and allowing them to have their views on what they think is the best direction’, and
marketing (such as for water conservation), where ‘we want to get a desired outcome – which is
reduce usage of a particular resource – and trying to look at different strategies to be able to do
that’.
Levels of participation
The types of participation involved in different research and engagement methods can be
distinguished using Reid et al.’s (2009) schema:
1.
Passive participation – top-down information campaigns
2.
Participation in information giving – extractive survey research
3.
Participation by consultation – externals define terms and listen to public views
4.
Participation for material incentives – such as rebates, give-aways, lower costs
5.
Functional participation – people form groups to help enact major decisions
6.
Interactive participation – people involved in analysing problems and making plans
7.
Self-mobilisation – people act for change independently of external institutions.
Most activities in Australia seem to be in the first four categories, especially 1 and 2, with a few
examples of types 5-7. It is more usual to ‘bring in people at the end of a decision-making
process, rather than getting them involved at the start’, though a few progressive water planners
are adopting an open-ended interactive approach where ‘[I]nstead of going out there with a
plan to the community and saying, “Look at all these pretty colours! This is what we’re going to
do!”, we actually go out with nothing – just a piece of paper, almost’.
In-house versus out-sourced research
Communications, marketing and public relations, and occasionally law, are the main HASS fields
where graduates are likely to find permanent jobs within the water sector. Scientific and
technical staff were hired and supported in their ongoing development through the extensively
networked water profession, but employing social researchers was seen a risking getting stuck ‘in
a rut’ with a single theory and method. Utilities preferred having a stable of marketing and social
research providers to chose from, though some researchers muttered about ‘tame’ and ‘obedient’
private consultancies who produced slick but superficial reports based on ‘crap social science’.
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
7
One problem is the poor quality of questions posed when STEM experts formulate social
research for commissioned HASS researchers.
3.3 Conclusion: A mixed-up world
[W]ater is the quintessential economic, environmental and social resource. – Ross Young,
former head of Water Services Association of Australia
HASS research offers opportunities to gain better understanding of cultures and communities,
histories, values and aspirations, which could improve how the water sector negotiates the
complex and inescapable politics of water as a social resource.
4. Water research in the HASS sector
r
Figure 2: Word cloud from bibliography sample
4.1 Why HASS research on water?
HASS researchers are not necessarily good at identifying or promoting the benefits of their
research (including economic benefits), or at ‘tailoring research to the choices facing decision-
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
makers’ (Shergold, 2011) so it is readily translatable into policy. Yet social and cultural researchers
have much to offer the water sector on the dimensions and complexities of water histories,
meanings and practices left out by statistical studies of normal behaviours and average users.
4.2 Characteristics of the researcher population
The group has some characteristics that make it difficult to chart, and render HASS research
strength invisible or inaccessible to the water sector—a situation the Tributaries directory aims to
help remedy:

Outsourcing of social research, classification of social research reports as ‘commercial in
confidence’ or ‘grey literature’, and erasure of authorship from government reports all make
it hard to track down researchers and reports.

Once collaborative projects are completed, there may not be anyone with the delegation,
interest, time, administrative support or remuneration to ‘back-report’ on them.
4.3 Diversity of social and cultural research
There seems to be little relation between problem area or topic, and which HASS disciplines
researched it: most topics could be tackled from a wide range of perspectives, many with mixed
methods, and in interdisciplinary collaborations with STEM and/or HASS researchers.
4.4 Some findings about the research landscape

There is a greater diversity, depth and range of research on water undertaken in HASS
disciplines than most water management agencies commission or use.

Many users of social research need better appreciation of the differences between marketing
and engagement, and different levels of participation.

Water managers have little understanding of ‘the humanities’ and use the term ‘social
science’ for disciplines that HASS researchers may not label social science.

The marginal status of HASS researchers on water means they have little power to influence
research programs or translate findings into organisational action.

HASS researchers on water in Australia generally have small and weak networks, few industry
jobs, no key journals, databases, research repositories, centres of excellence, annual
conferences, professional associations or spokespeople. However a number of research
centres do conduct social research on water.
5. Key problems encountered
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
r
9
5.1 Industry perspectives

Conflicting drivers - There was a gap between what the water industry wanted from
research and what universities rewarded: ‘ The researchers like to do the research, write the
papers and go to the conferences. The sort of transfer of technology into the business is not
what they like doing’.

Mismatched expectations - The rarely fulfilled hope that outsourced social research
providers would deliver in-house quality knowledge, with instructions answering the question
‘What do I do on Monday?’, seemed based on misapplication of engineering project
management models to HASS knowledge, which required collaborative translation.

‘Scaling up’: a pseudo-problem - Numerous pilot studies show that household participatory
and interactive approaches to change work best, but the industry’s problem is ‘ how do you
take that model and apply it … [to] three million residents?’ ‘Scaling up’ is a logic of
engineering, not society or human geography. People who aggregate into larger social
groups and settlements still function at the scale of people, households and smaller-scale
social groups, making ‘spreading out’ a better metaphor than ‘scaling up’.
5.2 HASS perspectives

Science as master discourse – science knowledge is ‘the norm when it comes to what
counts as valuable, relevant and important’. Calls for ‘integration’ of HASS knowledge more
often mean seeking social science data to feed into STEM-defined models (Sofoulis 2011a)
rather than, for example, acknowledging intersubjectively generated knowledge or feelings.

Instrumental approaches to HASS research - The master discourse of science allows STEM
experts to define questions for HASS researchers to answer, so that ‘the social science just
becomes a service provider, does not have any intellectual input into it at all, hasn’t been
part of defining the problem’.

Writing down the social, writing up the science - The ‘outputs’ of community engagement
interactions based on trust and altruism can be reduced to ‘data inputs’ for STEM-dominated
planning bodies, who may not feel obliged to acknowledge how those inputs affected
planning decisions that are represented as scientific and rational.
5.3 Bridging the divide: translation and translators
The disparity between HASS and STEM knowledge forms makes techniques of translation vital to
the success of social research and engagement projects and their implementation. There was a
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
‘Need [for] people who can do a hybrid job and cross over between social sciences,
environmental management and policy, and the biophysical sciences’. Some water planners filled
that role as ‘sort of interpreters … between science and decision-making’, or working ‘To translate
from the engineers […] out to the community, to local governments and the other stakeholders’.
5.4 Discussion
The need for greater dialogue and collaboration, especially at the earliest and late stages of
research projects, was a recurring theme in this research, and processes of knowledge translation
and integration were also important for bridging the differences between HASS researchers and
the water sector.
The translation of knowledge can occur between:

different STEM knowledges

different HASS knowledges

STEM and HASS knowledges, perhaps with the aid of intermediary persons

government, industry, university sectors, perhaps with the aid of intermediary organisations

water organisations (government or industry) or researchers and the community.
6. Collaborative Relationships
r
No-one pretends it is easy to collaborate across disciplinary, sectoral, and institutional
boundaries, but the general feeling amongst those who try it is that the outcomes are worth it,
or at least worth persistently striving for.
6.1 Collaborative Relationships
The metaphor of a marriage-like relationship is deployed as an organising metaphor for
examining research collaborations, partnerships that can go through different phases and turn
out less perfectly than hoped.
6.2 Getting acquainted – respect
Care had to be taken around matters of assumed knowledge and the assumption of science as
master discourse: ‘Need to start with an equal ground for both – there should not be an
assumption that the physical science knowledge is “superior” to the social sciences’. STEM or
industry partners are advised to ‘Explain your terminology clearly’ to HASS researchers, while
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
11
HASS researchers are cautioned not to ‘underestimate the knowledge of stakeholders or end
users of the research’. Openness about one’s own and one’s institutions’ different information
needs, goals and interests was essential.
6.3 Developing a relationship – mutuality
Social researchers needed to be flexible, ‘prepared to have leaky boundaries’ and perhaps take
on generic identities when developing collaborative partnerships with STEM or industry experts,
who have little appreciation of disciplinary distinctions and expertise within HASS. Moreover, ‘No
matter how arrogant the other disciplines may be we [social scientists] can’t afford to be
arrogant!’
6.4 Making a Proposal

Working up the question – Determining a question to collaborate on is a key step in
building a partnership, where ‘You need to start thinking about the social and cultural
aspects before the projects are under way so that it can be built into the scope of the
project’.

Modest beginnings – Undertaking a small and manageable pilot project can help build the
partnership while revealing problems with the framing of research questions and also
gathering data to help reframe them.

Drawing boundaries – interdisciplinary project teams need to thoroughly scope research
problems in order to identify and agree upon existing knowledge and capacities, contentious
areas, contextual issues, contemporary needs, available resources, and strategic priorities
(Bammer 2008, 881).
6.5 Sorting out the ‘pre-nup’
Smart collaborators aim to make expectations of the relationship explicit from the outset.

Intellectual property - Issues here include what is going to happen to the data, authorship
and name order, protocols for permissions to release data, publish results or share data with
other researchers, commercialisation of results.

Mentorship - Mentoring needs and arrangements for team members, postgraduates and
postdoctoral fellows should be agreed on in advance.

Project management - The approach should ideally be appropriate for HASS research and
negotiated by all parties, not imposed unilaterally.
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT

Ethics - A tip for HASS researchers is to explain the importance of ethics review to STEM
partners and negotiate for ethics approval to be accepted as a project milestone.
6.6 Collaborative undertakings
‘Gotta have fun’, advised one HASS researcher: ‘Collaborators have got to really want to spend
time together’. But even companionate or arranged partnerships can succeed ‘if engagement
from all is taken to be a given’. It helps to ‘Work from where the action is – on the ground’,
focusing on real-world problems rather than theories. A co-management approach—where all
institutional partners had members active on the project team—could facilitate knowledge
exchange, produce more useable results, and forestall the tendency for academic researchers ‘to
go into too much detail’ in overlong reports.
6.7 Prickly patches
Even with a good ‘pre-nuptial agreement’ a relationship can go through delicate moments.
Partners sometimes take strategic offence. But one fight need not spell the end; patience and
persistence pays off. Being able to discuss power relationships helps in resolving problems.
6.8 Reporting and Follow-Through

Short reports – University-based HASS researchers are notorious for writing long and ‘turgid’
reports (Illing 2011), though some researchers feel it ‘a “moral duty” to translate findings into
language that is community accessible’ and adapted to the research users.

Integrity and applicability of findings – To reduce vulnerabilty to partner pressure to tone
down research findings, HASS research ‘needs to be rigorous with strong, definite and
defensible findings, set in context, for example indicating limits about which levels or
domains they might apply in’. Industry is less excited by interesting theory than by practical
and applicable results; it wants to know ‘What do you want us to do? What should we do?’
even if it ‘means a compromise for the research because it means you’ve got to present it in
a really simplistic way’.

Evaluations – Agreement that evaluation is a good thing does not necessarily remove
obstacles to it, such as lack of budgets for it and partner sensitivity to possibly negative
findings.
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
13
7. Committed Engagements
r
7.1 The value of community engagement
Besides being a way of managing public controversy, community engagement affords
opportunities to integrate local and historical water knowledge into contemporary planning, and
can be a form of participatory democracy that contributes to good governance by allowing water
decision-making to be informed by a full spectrum of community and stakeholder views.

Politics of social research and engagement - It is risky to engage with publics and
communities, who may express things that governments and water companies would rather
not know, leading to fear of making decisions, a blinkered commitment to just ‘barrel along’,
and suppression of reports or findings due to political sensitivities.
7.2 Tips for community engagement

Expectations of engagement – The rise of new media platforms has increased community
expectations of being involved in water planning, heightening tensions between ‘lowest
common denominator’ appeals to an ‘average’ public versus engagement processes that
recognise people as skilled, informed and intelligent.

Starting out - Engagement needs to start early and establish common understandings of
why engagement is happening, how it fits in with decision-making processes, and what it will
contribute to the implementation of plans or policies.

Maintaining engagement - Maintaining an ongoing feedback loop is important, for example
through newsletters or involvement in related activities.

Engagement fatigue - Personnel changes within industry, government, and community
organisations can cause engagement processes to lapse, and later need restarting.

Resources for engagement – Many resources and organisations supported community
engagement practitioners and participatory processes, but detailed Australian case studies of
engagement might help convince more water managers to try it.
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
This chapter is largely based on discussions in breakout groups at the Building Collaborative
Capacity knowledge exchange workshop (24-25 March 2011). This summary omits analyses of
existing knowledge and focuses on ideas for future research.
8.1 Community engagement
8. Emerging Research Agendas

Detail a community engagement case study that worked well, to help support arguments for
community engagement.

Undertake a comparative interstate or intercity study of approaches to engagement, perhaps
on the theme of water-sensitive urban design.

Research the institutional barriers to undertaking community engagement.
r
8.2 Enabling communities to adapt

Investigate the values and benefits of water to communities and their roles in adaptation.

Monitor and document cases of successful adaptation strategies.

Investigate differences in adaptive capacities amongst urban, rural, and remote towns.

Investigate programs and research about children’s resilience and adaptive capacity.
8.3 Everyday water cultures

Develop more diverse and creative visual messages and media resources around water
conservation stories.

Cultivate researchers and managers to champion ‘everyday culture’ approaches.

Develop water co-management frameworks based around everyday water users.

Undertake longitudinal studies at multiple sites representing diverse water cultures.

Use action research and and participatory methods in research on everyday water topics.

The NWC could consider funding an ongoing social and cultural water research network.
8.4 Learning from elsewhere

Investigate water quality standards and notions of universal and local standards. What is the
cost of water ‘purity’ (e.g. water bottles, rainwater tanks, big infrastructure)?

How can people exercise local control, and adapt water management to context?
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
15

What can be learned from cultural studies and other cultures’ understandings of water?

Thinking with water: how can we extend our learning from new thinking in hydrology?
8.5 From research to policy and action

Develop a national facility for sharing knowledge on water’s social and cultural dimensions.

Cultivate cross-sectoral relationships by establishing specific partnership organisations.

Cultivate links between researchers using a social networking platform.

Undertake a case study of how a qualitative researcher has improved project outcomes, to
demonstrate the merits of this approach for the water sector.
8.6 Values of water

Collaborators need to clarify what counts as ‘values’ for different researchers, disciplinary
groups and stakeholders involved in a project.

Research the values of water, including emotional and symbolic meanings, to grasp the
cultural logics behind individual ‘attitudes’, and the obstacles and resources for change.

Research the different ways people in the water sector value water.

More social and interdisciplinary research was needed on the value and amenity of water in
the landscape and connections between water and well-being.
9. Connecting: symptoms, remedies
r
The body of HASS research on urban water is imaged here as a patient with various physical and
mental symptoms that hamper its effectiveness, but are treatable with suggested remedies.
Omitted from this summary are comparative findings and discussions of background and
rationale.
Symptom 1: Lacking in organisations
There is a lack of adequate organisational structures for the mutual strengthening and
promotion of HASS contributions to national agendas for innovation, adaptation, natural
resources management, and especially the urban water sector.
Remedies 1: Growing networks and organisations
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Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT

Publicly accessible database of researchers – The Tributaries directory dataset could be the
core of an on-line editable database of social and cultural researchers.

Funded network(s) of researchers – Marginal in both industry and their ‘home’ disciplines,
HASS researchers on water need support to network with other practitioners.

Professional association –This could coordinate public activities and conferences.

Lobby group – A HASS equivalent of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists could
provide high-level public and policy contributions.
Symptom 2: Poor circulation
There are significant issues around flows, stasis and blockages in sharing and disseminating
knowledge arising from social and cultural research on water.
Remedies 2: Research repository, ethics clarification

National data sharing - Develop a national coherent approach to sharing data, reports and
knowledge on the social and cultural dimensions of water,

National water industry research body – The water industry might consider establishing a
body like UK Water Industry Research, to which water utilities contribute funds distributed to
research projects of national benefit—including social research.

Ethics clarification exercise – An educational resource (or workshops) on human research
ethics could be a productive occasion for exploring assumptions about humans associated
with different paradigms of water management and social research.

Government styles review – Government writing guidelines ought be revised to
accommodate non-STEM knowledge conventions and intersubjective research methods.
Symptom 3: Conflicted motivations
Institutional disincentives are working against collaborations, cross-sectoral partnerships and
committed engagements, and are undermining effective policy impacts for many
researchers.
Remedies 3: Realign rewards

Review research outcomes measures - New national measures are needed for outcomes of
collaborative, cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary partnerships that recognise and reward the

labours of knowledge translation and transfer.

Revise ARC Linkage applications – The Australian Research Council’s Linkage Grants
Program could trial realigning researcher rewards with industry interests, via revised proposal
forms, budget categories, outcome measures and funds for knowledge transfer.
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
17
Symptom 4: Magical thinking
There is wide agreement that HASS inputs are needed into water management and should
be integrated into STEM knowledges, but in the absence of investment in the labour, time,
patience, co-learning and cooperation needed to achieve this integration, magical means will
be required to effect it.
Remedies 4: Translating and bridging

Translating and bridging (people) – Specific funding needs to be allocated to create or
support jobs for researchers doing knowledge translation, research brokering, and bridgebuilding between different departments, disciplines, or sectors.

Translating and bridging (organisations) - Better knowledge integration is achievable by
organisations set up to bridge different sectors and link research, policy and practice.
Symptom 5: Communication problems
Those who commission the social research often ask unenlightening questions, while those
who conduct it often write unreadable reports.
Remedies 5: Embedding, exchanging, employing

Embedding – Establish programs for HASS researchers from different disciplines and all
career levels to be ‘researchers in residence’ for periods within water organisations.

Exchanging - A program for exchanges/residencies of researchers within industry and
industry people within universities, perhaps via an Australian Research Council Linkage grant.

Employing – There are arguments for rebuilding research capacity in governments and water
authorities, including by hiring more people with HASS expertise.

Training of HASS researchers in report-writing – HASS researchers entering cross-sector
partnerships are advised to seek out mentorship or training in writing reports. Project
budgets could allow for professional editing of academics’ reports.

Training of water managers, planners, and policymakers in question-asking Experienced collaborators could be funded to develop and deliver workshops for government
and industry aimed at improving questions in commissioned research.
Symptom 6: Blind to elephants
The general devaluing of humanities and social science knowledges that goes with the
assumption of science as the master discourse, along with the huge disparities in project
funding and access to research infrastructures between the physical sciences and their ‘poor
relations’ in the humanities and social sciences (Macintyre 2010), are ‘elephants in the room’
18
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
(after Spoehr et al. 2010) that are politely avoided as topics of discussion by most people in
the field.
Remedies 6: Respect, evidence, redistribution

Avoid being arrogant about one’s own knowledge or dismissive of others’ knowledge.

Get across the relevant science - HASS researchers need to try and grasp the key scientific
understandings and technical features salient to their project.

Overcome shyness – Researchers could better promote the benefits of HASS research.

Provide case studies – Case studies of successful community engagement and qualitative
research in the water sector could build industry confidence in these areas.

Review water research funding eligibility guidelines – Grant eligibility guidelines for water
funding need to be reviewed and broadened to include HASS projects, by shifting from the
idea of ‘the science base’ to the HASS-inclusive concept of ‘the research base’ (British
Academy 2004, 72).
Prognosis
In conclusion, despite being comparatively small and far from ‘perfectly formed’ or well
presented, the body of HASS researchers on urban water nevertheless has an adaptive resilience
and robust will to continue to contribute its considerable skills and diverse knowledges to
national agendas and local efforts for innovation, sustainability and climate change mitigation
and adaptation. It is hoped that the analyses, ideas and provocations contained in the Cross-
Connections report and summarised here will positively contribute to this momentum, so that
the contributions of the humanities and social science to urban water management may be
broadened and deepened.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges: the National Water Commission Fellowship that
enabled the Cross-Connections research; a supplementary grant from the Australian
Humanities Academy for HASS workshop attendees; and logistical support from the
Centre for Cultural Research. Personal thanks to those who made special contributions to
the project, especially Research Associate Dr Justine Humphry, Research Assistant Vibha
Bhattarai Upadhyay, and Reference Group members, notably Prof. Ien Ang, NWC
Sofoulis — SUMMARY OF CROSS-CONNECTIONS REPORT
Commissioner
Chris Davis, and Prof. Gay Hawkins. The research depended on generous
19
contributions of time, thought, energy and travel funds from many individuals and
organisations involved in water and research, which are deeply appreciated. – ZS
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