Rivers are messy: Beyond the water bias in research and management

This article reviews current trends in interdisciplinary river research to argue that a “water bias” or tendency consider rivers as synonymous with water can hinder our understanding of rivers and consequently also their management. While water is central in defining rivers, contemporary scholarship across a wide spectrum of the natural sciences has expanded from an initial focus primarily interested in water to conceptualize rivers as a more complex set of ecological and physical processes that includes sediment, nutrients, microbial communities, flora and fauna. River research in the social sciences, however, almost exclusively considers rivers as hydrological processes, thus poorly reflecting these advances. We argue that overcoming this “water bias” is essential to both natural and social science research on rivers. Conceptualizing rivers as more than just water, combined with the tools of the social sciences, can generate more robust explanations of how rivers work socially and physically. This in turn can enable more effective river management in a time of rapid social, climatological, and ecological change, when acknowledging the “messy” nature of rivers and their politics and co-producing river knowledge are key to decision-making about rivers’ futures.