Locked-In learning systems? Transformation and regression potential in Australasia’s waterscapes and beyond

The ‘red-alert’ level heatwave was broken on the 19^th of July 2022 with a small flash flood. Water rushed down the bitumen driveways with more vibrancy than a typical urban canal. In the cooler and humid aftermath outside, a familiar smell was present. A wood fire? No – bushfire smoke! As we drove through the winding coastal streets, a haze hung over the vegetation, obscuring the collections of white houses with their slate grey roofs. It was an eerie reminder of recent years past. Having arrived at the beachfront, we climbed over the granite outcrop, trying not to slip on the wet rocks or disturb the mussels and cockles still bathing in their rockpools. Perching above the rising water, we could then see the smoke shrouding the bobbing boats in the protected bay. Although the winds soon changed and the bay returned to its beautiful, clear and slightly tormented self, I could not shake that feeling of Solastagia. This was northern Brittany, not the rocky Australian coastlines we learnt to recognise through the smoke of our own bushfires.

Change is a destabilising concept for many, just as imagining the future can be. I have been particularly fortunate to work with many futurists, explorers, scientists, raconteurs, leaders, builders and people who thrive on complexity – people who seek to make sense of, and embrace, the systems and futures we have responsibility for creating. Those who do not just analyse the signals or raise alarms, but proactively work to support others to adjust their worldviews and actions, and creatively design and prepare for the uncertainties of what comes next.

1. Paradoxical positions – challenges for our water futures

Having spent many recent years discussing and working collectively on our common water futures with colleagues from across the globe and across Australasia, there are some interesting themes emerging that present as potential paradoxes.

1.1.

Paradox 1: There is widespread recognition across the world that the increasingly extreme ‘mega’ events that Australia, the Pacific Islands and other countries have recently experienced are likely to also form part of their future in coming decades. However at the same time, there is widespread active denial or inaction for incorporating this recognition and mega or cumulative extreme event planning into planning and policy, particularly until similar extreme events are personally experienced and normal approaches to resilience and reconstruction become untenable for financial or political reasons.

1.2.

Paradox 2: To navigate the complexity of current challenges safely, responsibly and sustainably, truly systemic and cybernetic approaches to water governance are required – those that work with plurality of perspectives and uncertainties, as well as the complexity and interconnected cycles of feedback between sectors, actors and environmental, socio-political and technological facets. However, there is still great inertia in that the worldviews and actions of people who might support the idea of systemic approaches in theory, still remain limited and/or blocked by personal, organisational, institutional and disciplinary norms, assumptions and practices of breaking systems down into manageable elements, averages or silos, that are more comfortable and easy to control when resources are in competition or constrained.

1.3.

Paradox 3: Power and governance responsibility in technologically-mediated water systems resides with those who build and maintain the infrastructure in these waterscapes and profit from (or are nurtured by) their existence. This creates a conflictual situation in that despite realising power and governance responsibility often needs to be more equitably distributed in water systems for all to have a chance at thriving (e.g. for First Nations peoples, between urban and rural communities, between upstream and downstream areas) there is extreme hesitancy to adjust and plan for reshaping the often locked-in and legacy models that underpin these systems, particularly as power-sharing is really not that desirable to those who gain most from existing systems.

Where do our responsibilities lie in terms of these paradoxes? What is interesting in these seemingly paradoxical situations is that as citizens and water-engaged professionals, we can all assess where our own values, preferences, beliefs and then actions lie in relation to these situations. Perhaps fundamentally we believe and value the concepts of complex systems, foresight, proactivity, inclusion, equity and associated things. But do our actions and hence preferences exhibited in daily life represent these? Or to what extent are we still taking the easier (and/or fatalistic pathways) – relying on ‘what we’ve always done’ and assumptions that allow us to quickly justify choices? To what extent do we still have strong preferences and act to break our lives and decisions into manageable chunks, and ensure we do not let too much information or people with different views in, that could lead to discomfort and decision paralysis? We perhaps believe we can avoid regressing to even worse situations by keeping things simple – feeling comfort in the idea that a decision actively made considering just some inputs is better than one not made at all due to gridlock and/or too much conflict, uncertainty and complexity to manage.

2. Active reworking and relearning

So how might we all think about actively working to envision and work towards those futures we might desire, despite our own actions and preferences for comfort often actively thwarting us (intentionally or not)? One option is through adjusting the way we learn – breaking down the silos in our educational systems and learning with others who do not hold the same views or natural prejudices and biases as we might; seeing that it is possible to co-create with people with vastly different knowledges and ways, being and acting due to their experiences and positions in the world. Once we get used to this discomfort and make it a positive and productive experience, it is easier to do it again and again, working across previous barriers, engaging with a multiplicity of perspectives and having a network of people who can hold us to account for actions that align with values that have been collectively shared.

The first paper in this issue by Shelton et al. (2022) presents such an approach to characterising water-sensitive cities through inquiry-based learning systems, seeking to transform understanding of water practitioners from different cities and provide impetus for intervening systemically in their cities. Like all complex systems, there will be lots of challenges, with the authors outlining that: “Transitioning to water sensitive cities requires a combination of leadership, a supportive institutional-sectoral environment, practical implementation of technologies in social contexts and increased collaboration involving knowledge co-production across disciplines and sectors” (Shelton et al. 2022), although the approach has the potential to be transferred and further embedded across the water sector and beyond.

3. The dis/comfort of power and responsibility

Another way forward is to more explicitly consider power. This is uncomfortable for many people supporting and making decisions in their own arenas: public servants who must adhere to ‘apolitical’ codes of conduct; engineers and scientists who have been trained to base analysis (and models for supporting decisions) on expertise, data and their own forms of disciplinary knowledge; politicians who must work for their communities and stakeholder interests to remain elected and in a position to achieve their objectives; and managers who have set key performance indicators and business imperatives to uphold.

Yet, as those who experience feelings of powerlessness and inequities due to existing systems will outline, power is very real and re-distribution of it and the responsibility that comes from this require much greater clarity. Exposure of values and politics, our natural biases and interests, historical legacies and the power and lock-in embedded in current infrastructures, and narratives we still hold responsibility over, are a really important way of acknowledging the complexities of future water-related decisions and that there will be no one ‘right way’ to navigate next actions: just a whole lot of potentially different approaches full of different outcomes and tradeoffs.

In this issue, we have two papers analysing these issues in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing and conditions required to adjust these legacies. First, Kate Harriden reflects on these challenges through the case of stormwater drains in Canberra in her piece “Concrete in the City” (Harriden 2022), situations of current lock-in (that she calls ‘obdurancy’) and how the values of Indigenous sciences hold promise to contribute to different outcomes such as improving water quality. Hall et al. (2022) then investigate conditions for working towards more sustainable outcomes for remote Indigenous communities in terms of safe water and sanitation, including appropriate technologies fit to place and community, and required levels of cultural competency for delivery support staff.

4. Boundary and brokering work

When complexity of systems and multiplicity of values, needs and indicators for success multiply, and the work to manage these is too substantial for particular managers, then one of the opportunities is for the development of ‘brokering’ or ‘boundary’ organisations to do some of this challenging work of analysis and synthesis of multiple potential options and ways forward. These kinds of roles have for a long time been seen to bring value and an important part of systemic or cybernetic leadership (Campbell 2015; Gould et al. 2022), although maintaining a status as such an organisation is not that easy, considering the power and political issues noted above, including how to maintain legitimacy as a trusted advisor or synthesis provider. In line with this theme, in this issue, Boyden, van Rhijn, and Sharah (2022) provide a helpful example of noting the challenge many smaller rural communities have with managing their water infrastructure as effectively as possible under a range of criteria that are not just water related. Here, the case of NSW water infrastructure and carbon neutrality objectives supported by the organisation Public Works Advisor are investigated to inform potential future options for energy optimisation in small water utility contexts (Boyden, van Rhijn, and Sharah 2022).

5. Experimental futuring

For organisations or groups in planning, policy and operational roles to best develop systems ready for a range of futures and the inherent uncertainties in them, there remains a need for input into these through basic experimentation, analysis and envisioning of what future states of our waterscapes might look like and how/why/where/when these might occur. This is equally an important role of a journal like AJWR that seeks to act itself as a boundary organisation to bring together a range of knowledges, practices and designs that can inform the next waves of research and praxis relevant to water in the Australasian region. In this issue we have a number of articles aimed at contributing to the hydrological knowledge that can be contrasted and weighed up to support future policy and infrastructure design decisions. These contributions include Gao et al. (2022) on “Understanding Regional Streamflow Trend Magnitudes in the Southern Murray-Darling Basin, Australia” where they determine consistently negative magnitudes of up to 2.7% per year relative to annual averages at testing sites, despite some spatial variability linked to climate and terrain conditions (Gao et al. 2022). The final contribution to this issue then takes a synthesis and analysis approach of many different studies on “Dynamics and scales of transmission losses in dryland river systems” to perform a meta-analysis and draw out a range of conclusions on factors of major influence such as channel and catchment characteristics and the range of methods currently used to undertake these typically uncertain but highly important studies (Mujere et al. 2022).

Beyond these examples, all our authors in this issue provide small glimpses of possible futures, and potential challenges to these, in their papers. As Bell (2021a,b) describes and discusses, these glimpses of the future are all around us, only unequally distributed, as the famous science-fiction writer William Gibson will tell us. Our choices are now to collectively create the water futures we want from those glimpses, work to create the next set of glimpses for future generations to take inspiration from, and learn to relegate certain glimpses that might be unjust or unsustainable to our histories, rather than our futures.