Bridging waters and power: Hydrosocial territories with socio-natural resilience in China’s Great Yangtze River protection programme

Overview

This study integrates socio-natural resilience with hydrosocial territory analysis to examine governance transformations within China's Great Yangtze River Protection Programme. The research positions resilience not as a technical framework but as a political process embedded in power dynamics, state control, and market mechanisms. The analysis incorporates critical hydropolitics to reveal how upstream-downstream interactions are shaped by hydro-hegemonic configurations and broader transboundary power asymmetries.

Methods and approach

The research employs field-based empirical data collected from the Great Yangtze River Protection Programme to ground the theoretical integration of socio-natural resilience and hydrosocial territory concepts. The study engages critical hydropolitics as an analytical lens to interpret governance mechanisms and power relations. The approach examines three specific capacities—absorptive, adaptive, and transformative—as they operate within water governance contexts, with particular attention to how diverse actors (river chiefs, provincial authorities) navigate bureaucratic and market pressures.

Key Findings

The analysis demonstrates that continuous reconfiguration of hydrosocial territories represents a fundamentally political process rather than technical adjustment. Socio-natural resilience operates through absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities that simultaneously reconfigure power relations within hydrosocial territories. Hydrosocial territories achieve resilience by integrating technological, physical, social, and natural spaces and relations. The GYRPP exhibits how actors operate across bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms, including negotiations over clean water commodification and management of state-imposed pressures.

Implications

Theoretical frameworks examining water governance must recognize resilience as intrinsically linked to power dynamics and hegemonic struggles rather than as a neutral technical capacity. The integration of socio-natural resilience with hydrosocial territory analysis provides analytical tools for understanding complex multi-scalar governance transformations where state control and market mechanisms operate simultaneously. The study reveals that hydro-hegemonic configurations shape transboundary water interactions, with upstream-downstream asymmetries structuring outcomes of resource management and governance arrangements.

Scope and limitations

This summary is based on the study abstract and available metadata. It does not include a full analysis of the complete paper, supplementary materials, or underlying datasets unless explicitly stated. Findings should be interpreted in the context of the original publication.