Living well with water: democratising Flood Risk Management through reconceptualising social values

Amid climate and ecological crises, the likelihood of flooding and its devastating impacts increases. As a result, Flood Risk Management (FRM) recognises the need to adapt its management approach; it can no longer keep building higher walls and defences to keep water out. This reality has been recognised in policy paradigm shifts that accept, to certain degrees, the inevitability of flooding and look instead to find ways of learning to live with water. However, owing to the technocratic governance at the heart of FRM, it has been difficult to see how such a transition in governance approaches might be democratically enacted. Rooted in ecological economics, yet drawing on insights from environmental humanities, indigenous scholarship, cultural geography and anthropology, this interdisciplinary thesis looks to explore the potential of social values in this context, aiming to unsettle the technocratic governance of FRM, democratise decision-making and facilitate shifts towards worldviews that are reflective of this ‘living with water’ policy paradigm. Traditionally, social values have been conceived and explored through social science approaches based within a dualist ontology. This has been characterised through associations with much-criticised environmental valuation frameworks such as Ecosystem Services and Nature’s Contributions to People. Recognising the shortcomings of social values in their current conceptualisations and associations with such frameworks, this thesis explores their potential in light of the Life Framework of Values (LFV). LFV builds upon the critiques of previous valuation frameworks and offers an expanded ethical and ontological framing of human-nature relationships. This thesis argues that social values can facilitate the shift from purely instrumentalist framings of nature, living from, and towards more relational framings, such as living with.
Situating social values between ecological economics and ecological democracy, I articulate how their potential lies at these intersections, what I refer to as the economy-environment-democracy nexus. I argue that this potential can only be realised by materialising social values in an ontological politics and design thinking responding to pluriversal ideas. This argument draws upon a variety of ethnographic approaches that trace social values across three sites of FRM decision-making in York, UK. Beginning with a critique of the current ‘de-futuring’ design of FRM governance, I turn to think through the materiality of water and the more-than-human, speculating as to how the ‘social’ of social values might be materially constituted through human and more-than-human relations. This leads to an articulation of social values as a ‘fuzzy’ conceptual tool that holds together different ontological, political and economic paradigms. This ‘fuzziness’ lies in the ability of social values to simultaneously i) de-naturalise economics as an obstacle to democratic possibilities, whilst ii) moving beyond the anthropocentrism and representational logics of liberal democracy, that can sometimes be slow and ineffective in bringing about environmental change, towards generating publics of resonance through everyday material practices. This ‘fuzziness’ is articulated through a ‘pluriversal lens’ that enables transitions between these paradigms resting on an understanding of the performativity of values and valuation methods; that values and the methods used to understand them aren’t just about the world but make worlds too. Re-thinking social values in this way performs ecological democracy and enables the kind of socio-ecological transitions that contexts such as FRM have been calling for; offering more generative possibilities of living well with water and socio-ecological flourishing.