Transboundary resilience: the case of social-hydrological systems facing water scarcity or drought

‘Transboundary Risk’ and its management are widely acknowledged concepts, real-world problems and policy challenges preoccupying the fields of geography, sociology, political science, management and disaster studies. Up to the present, the notion of ‘boundary’ in the study and management of transboundary risks principally refers to national borders, whereas other important boundaries, such as the physical boundaries of drainage basins, the boundaries of social-ecological systems (SESs) or the lines separating public from private space, are rarely considered with respect to their penetration by risk dynamics. Resilience has been acknowledged in the case of SESs as an operation appealing to various spatial and temporal scales for access to vital resources. However, the spatio-temporal boundaries which are surpassed or penetrated in the process of transition from one scale to another is an unexplored issue. The authors focus their attention on a specific type of SESs, the social-hydrological systems (SHSs), facing the stress (risk) of water scarcity or drought, and assume that resilience of SHSs may be a process of attraction of water resources from other, probably distant SHSs. This type of resilience which transfers vulnerability might be termed trans-boundary resilience because it necessitates the breaking of boundaries and the spatial transformation of SHSs. This view considers resilience as a transboundary and trans-scalar dynamic process facilitating resource transfer and unveils its spatial dimension as well as its ethical and normative aspects. These assumptions are empirically confirmed in a range of water scarcity and drought problems, which are the following: (a) cities relying on water transfer from distant river basins; (b) agricultural populations and holdings facing drought and relying on a shared aquifer; and (c) arid islands. Whether this type of resilience is valid in other SES cases and other types of risk, is a matter of future research.