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

Abstract. Sociohydrology has advanced explanations of coupled human-water systems, but its translation into decision support remains uneven. We argue that a practical bridge from systems thinking to systems doing can be built around two complementary abstractions: (i) canonical feedback structures that make cases comparable without erasing context, and (ii) critical pathways that trace how interventions propagate through behavior, exposure, and outcomes. Canonical forms help organize recurring emergent phenomena such as the levee effect and reservoir effect, while critical pathways turn these insights into a repeatable workflow for intervention design, monitoring, and adaptive learning. We propose a minimal "systems doing loop" that links feedback mapping, pathway tracing, indicator selection, and iteration, with equity and legitimacy treated as explicit constraints on what counts as useful knowledge and acceptable action. This framing complements integrated water resources management by making unintended consequences operational and by clarifying what to monitor and revisit when system behavior changes.