Narratives and water: A bibliometric review

Social and environmental sciences have shown that narratives have significant impact on human behaviour. Understanding water narratives can therefore help policy-makers understand and regulate public behaviour. We carry out a bibliometric analysis of water narratives, which gives us a broad overview of the types of work, collaborations and key insights. We couple this with a smaller qualitative review, which enabled us to construct a typology that captures the range of themes found in the literature. Narratives might be classified along an axis of expert and local knowledge and an axis of time – retrospective and prospective. We also show that narratives are a useful tool for legitimation and mobilization, and a form of “System 1” heuristic. Given that so many water challenges are tied to human activities, an understanding of water narratives and the link to behavioural change would be a useful part of future research agendas.