The Role of Narratives in Sociohydrological Models of Flood Behaviors

While current efforts to model sociohydrologic phenomena provide crucial insight, critics argue that these do not fully reflect the complexity one observes empirically in the real world. The policy sciences, with its focus on the interaction between human agency and the institutions that constrain public choice, can complement such efforts by providing a narrative approach. This paper demonstrates this complementarity by investigating the idea of resilience in a community response to floods. Using the quantitative Q methodology, we trace the dynamics of a common sociohydrologic hypothesisthe memory effect and how it decreases vulnerability and, more crucially, the instances when such memory effects do not obtain. Our analysis of a floodprone maladaptive community in Assam, India, finds four distinct narrative types: the Hardened Preparer, the Engineer, Discontent, and the Pessimist. This paper put forward an explicitly sociohydrological conception of resilience which takes into account the role of sociological indicators such as narrative types and perceptions. Such contextual understandings and narrative types can form the basis of generic resilience indicators which complement the anticipated outcomes of sociohydrologic models generally. Plain Language Summary There are models which predict that people who experience small and medium sized floods cope better than those who have experienced no floods at all (e.g., those who have the benefit of infrastructure that shield them from such floods. These communities will then be highly vulnerable when large floods strike because they have little adaptive power. This paper shows that this binary effect need not be trueby conducting a microlevel narrative analysis in flood prone communities in Assam, we find that while the memory effect of floods does decrease vulnerability in some instances, such memory effects do not always obtain. It investigates one such case where these effects appear to be missing. The paper therefore suggests four distinct groups of flood responses: Aside from the well-established memory and levee effects, there are two other groups which may resist either effect. Each group has different reasons for either adapting to, or resisting the changes required to continue living along the embankments. This paper puts forward an explicitly sociohydrological conception of resilience and shows how such contextual understandings can complement the anticipated outcomes of sociohydrologic models generally.