HESS Opinions: Operationalizing sociohydrology from systems thinking to systems doing for sustainable and resilient water management

Sociohydrology has advanced explanations of coupled human-water systems, but its translation into decision support remains uneven. We propose two complementary approaches to move from systems thinking to systems doing: (i) canonical feedback structures, which describe the main components of human-water systems and how they interact and enable comparison across cases while accounting for important local differences; and (ii) critical pathways, which trace how management actions propagate through these components to produce outcomes, including unintended consequences. Drawing on cases such as the levee effect and reservoir effect, these approaches connect system understanding with intervention design, monitoring, and adaptive learning. We then propose a minimal “systems-doing loop” that links the decision setting, feedback mapping, pathway tracing, indicator selection, and iteration, with equity and legitimacy treated as explicit constraints on useful knowledge and acceptable action. This framing complements predictive modelling and integrated water resources management by accounting for potential unintended consequences in decision-making and clarifying what to monitor and revisit as systems change.