Water security covers a wide range of issues and risks to people, the natural and built environment, the economy, and interactions between these. This breadth creates an interconnected complexity and the potential for perceived intractability. Tackling water security meaningfully therefore requires a judgement in balancing the holistic nature of water security with reductionist understanding of key processes and elements. This paper demonstrates that systems thinking can be adapted to achieve this through different systems framings of water security, tailored to local context. Through four case studies, we show how systems thinking has been adapted and applied to fit the contextual analysis and management of multiple water security issues. We show how this approach has dissolved disciplinary and sectoral silos; changed the spatial scale at which water security is addressed; improved data acquisition and analysis to better understand relationships between sub-systems; and integrated socio-ecological issues of justice and power with more traditional bio-physical understandings of water security. This is an important step towards turning systems thinking into systems transformation and making the concept of water security actionable and accessible to policy, planning, and practice.

At the international level, the term “water security” (WS) has gained increasing attention in recent decades. At the operational level, WS is assessed using tools that define the concept using a variety of dimensions and sub-dimensions, with qualitative and quantitative indicators and parameters. The breadth of tools and concepts is an obstacle to the operationalisation of the concept of water security (WS). Clearly, we need a range of diverse data to evaluate water security (WS). However, there are several barriers to designing an optimal Data Gathering Strategy (DGS). Such a strategy must strike a balance between a wide range of competing and overlapping data requirements and characteristics including: resources, information, and impact. The proposed framework aims at filling the existing gaps, not by providing a strict procedure, but instead acting as a “compass”: five interfaces between data and context are identified to orient practitioners towards an optimal DGS. The conceptual aim of the framework can be summarised as shifting the focus of the DGS from a “data-to-information approach” to a “data-to-action approach,” therefore stressing the importance of reaching key stakeholders with information. The specific aims of this paper are to: identify the key issues that should be addressed in designing a Data Gathering Strategy for Water Security (DGSxWS); communicate the key issues with a clear conceptual framework; and suggest approaches and activities that could help water practitioners in dealing with the issues identified.

Water management has followed a basin unit paradigm for several decades. This framing often inherits a pre-defined spatial and institutional boundary of analysis, one that largely fails to account for various externalities influencing water security beyond the hydrological unit. Moving away from this established basin-scale analysis, we present the concept of problemscapes, a systems approach for understanding how multiple physical and social drivers surrounding (and as part of) contextual water systems determine how they work and, ultimately, the outcomes in terms of the water security they provide. By first discussing the concept of boundaries for water paradigms, we argue that problemscapes can help us understand water security as a more dynamic and hybrid system by adapting these boundaries; enabling a clearer understanding of leverage points, interconnections and possible strategic solutions to longer-term water security challenges. We apply the method for establishing and utilizing a problemscape analysis across the Central Rift Valley, Upper Awash, and Abbay basins, as well as the capital city of Addis Ababa. The interactions in this part of Central Ethiopia are notoriously complex, with sets of critical water management issues at national and international scale, hybrid water security challenges across user communities, and contested management at different scales amidst multiple, and sometimes competing, ideologies. We show that problemscaping as an approach could support future planning decisions for long-term water security by enabling a systems perspective to emerge where complexity and connectivity between actors, institutions, and physical and social entities is considered.

1. The UK government has advocated the adoption of systems thinking across the policy agenda, notably in environment (Department for Environmental & Rural Affairs [DEFRA], 2019, 2022; Government Of...