Global water systems are facing unprecedented pressures, including climate change‐driven drought and escalating flood risk, environmental contamination, and over allocation. Water management and governance typically lack integration across spatial scales, including relationships between surface and ground water systems. They also routinely ignore connectivity across temporal scales, including the need for intergenerational water planning. As a global and interdisciplinary group of scientists, we seek to highlight how power and scale dynamics influence and determine water outcomes. We argue that attending to complex water systems challenges requires understanding the function and influence of power at different temporal and spatial scales. Building this understanding is key to designing multi‐scalar, reflexive, and pluralistic policy solutions that avoid ineffective or unintended outcomes. We use a co‐learning process to reveal important lessons for the challenge of interdisciplinary research and set a pluralist agenda for understanding power and scale in future water governance.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Methods

In events and discussions about transboundary aquifer assessment, trust is often cited as an essential component of collaborative efforts. However, there is little discussion of what trust is, how it is built, what diminishes trust, and why it is so important. This study uses ethnographic research carried out between 2019 and 2021 with the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program (TAAP) to examine the role and significance of trust in U.S./Mexico TAAP collaborations. This study demonstrates that trust is best understood in relationship to power and risk. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of the TAAP program in managing asymmetrical relationships of power and unequal levels of risk in participation. In TAAP collaborations, the insistence on establishing trust should signal participants to consider and address the underlying issues of risk and power.

Water sustainability in the Lower Rio Grande region of southern New Mexico faces mounting challenges, including growing agricultural and municipal demands, uncertain policy directives, and prolonged drought conditions. Fallowing—temporarily taking land out of production—has been proposed as a strategy to conserve water, but its long-term effectiveness for sustaining both water resources and the agricultural economy remains unclear. This study builds on existing, previously published System Dynamics (SD) models, extending it through the integration of newly collected qualitative data to implement fallowing strategy and the development of a stakeholder-oriented decision support interface. The tool integrates SD modeling with social science insights derived from 49 semi-structured ethnographic interviews with local farmers to ensure relevance and usability. The SD model includes seven interconnected modules—hydrology, water use, agricultural and non-agricultural production, population, labor, and wages—along with fallowing-specific variables. The model incorporates hydro-agro-economic data for 205 variables, enabling simulation of feedback loops across water systems, economic activities, and land use decisions. Key DSS features include the ability to evaluate scenarios related to water rights, cover cropping, irrigation efficiency, mixed surface and groundwater use, crop rotation, and fallowing schedules. The DSS allows users to input specific farm-level information and visualize the long-term impacts of fallowing strategy on water availability and agricultural outcomes. Through an interactive interface, the tool aims to support data-driven decision-making among farmers, policymakers, and water managers. By combining scientific modeling with community engagement, this research contributes a practical framework for promoting sustainable water management and resilient agricultural systems in arid regions.