Deltas in Crisis:

From Systems to Sophisticated Conjunctions

Casper Bruun Jensen & Atsuro Morita

Osaka University

Thailand’s worst floods in half a century have killed nearly 400 people since
mid-July, damaged millions of tonnes of rice and forced a series of industrial
estates to close.
The government, central bank and economists have slashed their economic
growth forecasts for the year. Rebuilding could require billions of dollars and
it will take months for some manufacturing operations to be up and running
again.
[…]
The floods have forced seven big industrial estates north of Bangkok to close,
affected at least 9,859 factories and 660,000 jobs.
The electronics and car sectors have suffered; Thailand is a regional hub for
the world’s top car producers, and even if most of the big assembly plants are
in the east, away from the floods, car part firms have been hit.
[…]
Thailand is also the world’s biggest rice exporter and the government has
estimated that it could lose a quarter of its main crop due to the floods.
Harvesting of the crop began in October and the government says output
could be 19 million tonnes of paddy rather than 25 million.
(Factbox: Thailand's flood crisis and the economy, November 2, 2011)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-foods-factbox/factbox-thailands-
flood-crisis-and-the-economy-idUSTRE7A11BC20111102

The 2011 floods in Thailand demonstrated the tremendous force of extreme weather
events. They also made plainly visible the vulnerability of modern infrastructures to
large-scale flooding. With repeated flood events from Hurricane Catharina (New
Orleans 2005) to Hurricane Harvey (Houston 2017), rising flood risks in deltas across
the world have stirred up deep concern over climate change and sea level rise. If
modernization was characterized by massive landform changes that basically
terrestrialized amphibious delta lands, fens and marshes, increasingly violent floods

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allude to coming reversals, with reclaimed delta land subjected to submergence on a
massive scale.
As social and natural scientists debate the implications of flood events, deltas
have emerged as a new matter of concern in numerous fields from Earth System
Science, disaster management, and sustainable development to social anthropology
and science and technology studies (STS). Thus, the past decades bear witness to a
growing number of academic and applied projects and publications that focus on the
state of deltas. Our aim in this paper is to characterize and intervene in these partially
connected but also importantly divergent discussions. In particular, we are interested
in clarifying the stakes and challenges to social and natural sciences, and
collaborations between them, posed by delta transformations and their uncertainties.
Our general argument is that the delta crisis creates new opportunities, and
perhaps obligations, for social and natural scientists to reimagine relations between
their diverse fields. To set out the stakes, we begin by examining how environmental
science engages the delta crisis, and how these new descriptions offer provocations to
social studies of deltas, including those found in political ecology, social
anthropology and STS.
The approaches to the delta crisis listed above are characterized by several
differences in orientation and emphasis. While social scientists tend to identify land
reclamation as a crucial risk factor (Biggs 2012; Morita 2017; Morita and Jensen
2017), Earth System scientists depict delta submergence as a symptom of planetary
environmental change, an unfolding process epitomized with the adoption of the
Anthropocene as a new geological era. This difference is also manifest in the spatial
and temporal scales these studies employ. Social scientists usually take up particular
deltas and frame their problems in the context of modernization or (post-)colonial
development. Environmental scientists, on the other hand, are generally more
concerned about global water circulation and sediment transport. As a corollary of
this focus, they tend to locate delta transformations within a geological time scale.
Despite these differences, about which we will have more to say later, it is
also noticeable that both social and natural scientists emphasize the role of modern
infrastructure planning, which brought about massive river engineering and land
reclamation, as the major cause of the rising flood risk in deltas. As we show later on,
this critique of infrastructure goes hand in hand with an emergent view of the
environment as inherently dynamic and unpredictable. Indeed, Earth System science

2
has depicted the planetary environment as far more dynamic than previously
imagined. It is this dynamism that undermines modern infrastructural planning which
has always assumed the stability of the ground.
In summary, then, the delta crisis raises fundamental questions about the
modernist approach to infrastructure and planning. And indeed, it is due to this
awareness that environmental scientists have come to see ‘the social’ as an integral
part of the crisis, a perception that in turn has led to new forms of collaboration with
social scientists.
However the ways in which the social comes to figure in Earth Systems
Science is ambiguous and unstable. While emphasizing the importance of resilience
and adaptation in dealing with changing environments and, by extension, arguing for
dynamic learning and transformation of society and its political institutions, earth
scientists often make technocratic appeals to policy to deliver science-based solutions.
Doing so, they maintain a view of society as amenable to rational manipulation,
which political ecology and STS have shown to be questionable. Below we explore
this dual imagination of the social and survey some of the problems it engenders. On
this basis we argue for the importance of opening Earth System imaginations to wider
currents of human and social sciences. Drawing on what Barbara Hernstein Smith
(2012) has called “sophisticated conjunctions,” we suggest that this entails
developing cosmo-ecological ways of conceiving the delta crisis that are at once
alternative and complementary to the system imagination.

Deltas in Crisis
In 2012, the journal Global Change featured a cover story by the geologist James
Syvitski entitled “Anthropocene: An Epoch of Our Making.” Focusing on how
“humans have changed the Earth in a number of fundamental ways […], which are
far less known than global warming” (Syvitski et al 2012:13), the authors paid
particular attention to the flux of soil:

[I]nfrastructure – dams, cities, transportation networks and coastal-

management measures – has led to lasting and profound impacts. […] The
large dams […] trap more than 2.3 Gt of sediment every year in reservoirs.
This starves deltas of sediment and, in combination with the mining of water,
oil and gas, has led to a situation where large deltas are sinking at four times

3
 the rate of sea-level rise. […] By any unbiased and quantitative measure,
humans have affected the surface of the Earth at a magnitude that ice ages
have had on our planet, but over a much shorter period of time (Syvitski et al
2012: 14)

If social scientists tend to locate the problem of submerging deltas within the
historical (and thus temporal) context of modernization, Syvitski and his colleagues
define the issue at a planetary spatial and geological time-scale. From this vantage
point, delta transformations are effects of massive, slowly accumulating
environmental changes caused by dams, dikes and urban infrastructures. Drawing on
remote sensing facilities from major national research organizations gathered under
the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), submerging deltas thus
appear as a global issue, integral to the human-induced transformation of the planet
referred to as the Anthropocene.
While Syvitski’s analysis is part of Anthropocene discourse, it is worth
noticing that it relies on an imagination that is significantly different from that of
climate change. The latter narrative brings together entities and processes including
carbon dioxide emissions, oil infrastructure, the capitalist economy, deforestation,
ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and sea level rise, relating them in a causal
chain that (often) begins with the capitalist extraction of fossil fuels, leading on to the
construction of modern energy infrastructure, and from there to carbon dioxide
emissions, global temperature rise and ocean acidification. In contrast, the former
story foregrounds the complex and unruly nature of deltas and the unintended
outcomes of a variety of human interventions. For example, Eduardo Brondízio and
his colleagues noted that:

As the intersection of landmass, river basin, and large bodies of water, deltas
are naturally very dynamic. They grow, sink and change courses, shaping land
and aquatic ecosystems, posing challenges for human settlements and
navigation. Humans attempt to stabilize delta dynamics by various means,
[…] many of them involving coastal engineering, channeling and land
reclamation […] (Brondízio et al 2016: 185-6)

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Here, the dynamic nature of deltas interacts with human efforts to stabilize them, and
this interaction is what currently brings about the unexpected outcome of massive
land subsidence. In this story, then, the delta crisis is attributed to a heterogeneous
series of actors and relations, from dike and dam construction to groundwater
extraction and urban infrastructures, all of which are part of engineering interventions
to transform dynamic deltas into more habitable environment for humans.
In fact, this distributed scene makes the delta story appear even more pessimistic
than that of climate change. For the latter, after all, it has been possible to imagine
decarbonization of the economy as a potential technological fix, even if it has already
become quite unrealistic. No analogous technological fix can be imagined for sinking
deltas, however, since the loss of sedimentation is caused by so many fundamental,
mundane and interlocked technological elements of modern cities. The only obvious
solution to the problem would be large-scale removal or fundamental alteration of
basic infrastructures such as dikes and dams, which is evidently impossible in the
foreseeable future.
In a Science paper scrutinizing the vulnerability of 48 deltas, the
environmental scientist Zachary Tessler and his colleagues clearly articulate the
predicament. Conceivably, the vulnerability of these deltas to land subsidence could
be alleviated by high-levels of infrastructural investment, yet this solution “has been
called into question because of their heavy reliance on external financial and energy
subsidies.” Considering “a future scenario in which infrastructure costs have
increased”, the authors find that deltas from the Mississippi and the Rhine to Chao
Phraya and Yangtze would “disproportionally” increase in vulnerability compared
with less-developed deltas (Tessler et al 2015: 641). Among other things, this story
of delta transformations highlights the unruly interactions between dynamic
landforms and the fixed materiality of infrastructures. In turn, the unexpected
consequences of these interactions undermine fundamental presumptions of modern
infrastructural planning.
As noted by the anthropologist Hannah Knox (2017: 358), “anthropological
discussions of state planning have frequently centred on the way in which the
improvement of society is pursued through infrastructural transformations in the built
environment.” This approach, which Knox calls an “infrastructural mode of
planning”, entails “demarcating the kind of society that is desired by creating

5
material systems (neighbourhoods, electricity networks, roads, waterways, railways)
that might enable that society to be brought into being” (Knox 2017: 358).
However the delta crisis challenges this infrastructural imagination in two
ways. For one thing, the stable demarcation of society and infrastructural systems is
undermined by the dynamic nature of deltas, which requires consideration of
temporal and spatial scales outside the infrastructural purview. For example,
infrastructures such as dams and dikes might serve as means to bring about a flood-
free city. In this case, the scale of infrastructure corresponds with that of the desired
society, and the environment that encompasses them operates as a stable background,
which the planners can happily ignore, given due attention to “environmental impacts”
that are imagined as circumscribed. Earth System Science profoundly questions this
imagination by extending the consequences of infrastructure to planetary and
geological scales. Equipped with satellites, data archives and computer simulation
models, it depicts changing sediment flows caused by numerous dams and dikes that
are partially connected by the global water circulation cycle. What this makes visible
is that it is the interactions between infrastructure and environment that causes the
increasingly perceptible variety of negative side effects.
Moreover, these unexpected consequences raise fundamental questions about
conventional planning frameworks, which simultaneously separate engineering
methods from social ends and assume that the former provides the means for
achieving the latter. Rather than neutral systems for the provisioning of social goods,
infrastructures come into view as agents operating in complex webs of bio-
geochemical, ecological and socio-economic processes, the consequences of which
are almost invariably surprising. This adds further ammunition to the anthropological
critique of a modern engineering and management imagination that sees good
outcomes as following causally from good planning (Suchman 1987; Knox 2017).

Future Earth and Social-Ecological Systems

One general implication of this dynamic view for environmental scientists is that it
requires careful studies of the interfaces between environment, infrastructure and
society. Another is that this research has significant implications in terms of what is
required to sustainably manage the planetary environment. The expansive
interdisciplinary field known as Earth Systems Science, which grew out of the so-

6
called Global Environmental Change programs created in the 1980s has been the
driving force behind this process of re-imagination.
Originally aiming to analyze “the entire Earth System on a global scale by
describing how its component parts and their interactions have evolved, how they
function, and how they may be expected to continue to evolve on all timescales”
(Earth System Science Committee, NASA 1986: 4), Earth System Science is mostly
comprised by natural science approaches with a particular emphasis on the analysis
of large-scale remote sensing data collected by satellites. While the significance of
human activities to the Earth system was recognized from the early on, various forms
of social science—notably institutional theory, but also bits of sociology and
anthropology—have only more recently become integral to this research (Brondízio
2016). In 2015, most of the Global Environmental Change programs and number of
social scientists working on environmental issues were consolidated under a new
platform called Future Earth.
The framework document “Future Earth: Research for Global Sustainability”
(2012) describes a situation in which humanity is facing unprecedented risks due to
“more rapid and complex global interactions between social and environmental
components of the Earth system and clear indications of significant shifts in climate,
biodiversity, pollution loads and other critical factors” (1). The delta crisis stemming
from the disturbances of sediment transport and water cycle represents one of these
planetary shifts. Amidst these Anthropocene syndromes (Meybeck 2003), humanity
finds itself with no “adequate answers as to how to safeguard prosperity and
development” (Future Earth 2012: 2). Accordingly, Future Earth designates new kind
of research in support of global sustainability, which the team described as “co-
produced with society and seamlessly integrating social and natural sciences.”1
There is nothing particularly new about calling for interdisciplinary
collaboration in environmental studies. In anthropology, approaches combining

1
The notion of co-production originates in the STS literature, where it was used to
conceptualize the de facto inseparability between domains such as science and policy, which
had conventionally been viewed as sharply separated (e.g. Latour 1987, Nowotny et al 2001,
Jasanoff 2004). Future Earth, however, depicts co-production as an aspiration and inscribes it
with a normative dimension. In contrast with STS usage, which emphasizes productive
differences in perspectives, methods and epistemologies, Future Earth thus describes co-
production in terms of a vision of ”seamless integration.” As we discuss below, this is a point
of tension with the ’sophisticated conjunctions’ between disciplines” that we suggest the
delta crisis calls for.

7
ecology and sociology dates back to the early 20th century. Based on the
Humboldtian tradition of natural history, anthropologists including Franz Boas in the
United States, Daryll Forde in the United Kingdom and Kinji Imanishi in Japan
explored connections between social and cultural forms and the environment. In the
1960s, the development of ecosystems ecology and cybernetics also had a profound
impact on this field. Future Earth’s vision of seamless integration, however, takes a
distinctive form.
Like its quasi-precursors, Future Earth also draws on a theory of ecology.
However the theory has changed radically. This is not least due to the work of the
ecologist C. S. Holling, who has argued since the 1970s that the recurrent failures of
the modern planning paradigm of natural resource management can be largely
ascribed to its presumption of a stable environment. This image, Holling proposed,
would need to be replaced by one in which human disturbances bring about complex
and unpredictable ecosystems behavior.
In a major paper, Holling (1973: 6) had observed that then dominant
ecosystems theory could only approximate the behavior of “a self-contained system
that was fairly homogenous and in which the climatic fluctuations were reasonably
small.” Unfortunately, “real world examples” of such systems were rare if not non-
existent. In reality, Holling wrote, “we are dealing with a system profoundly affected
by changes external to it, and continually confronted by the unexpected” (1). And
thus, he continued, the constancy of system behavior “becomes less important than
the persistence of the relationships.” On this background, he defined resilience as an
ecosystem’s capacity to absorb disturbance while adapting to a changing environment
(see also Benson and Craig 2017; Chandler 2014; Folke 2006; Stockholm Resilience
Center 2015). In place of homeostatic models that assumed a single ecological
equilibrium, systems were seen as having many possible equilibrium points and thus
as “multi-stable.”2
Over the past few decades, resilience has indeed become a key notion in field
as diverse as natural resource management and sustainable development, disaster
prevention and international security. The key implication of resilience in these fields

2
An idea originally explored by the British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby (1960). Contrary to
earlier ecological assumptions of “stationarity”—“ the idea that natural systems fluctuate
within an unchanging envelope of variability” (Milly et al. 2008: 573), the successor image is
one of planetary unpredictability and fundamental instability.

8
is a shift away from rational planning toward a new form of governance called
adaptive management (Chandler 2014). Rather than employing rational planning to
achieve maximum sustainable yield, for example, adaptive management aims to
adjust to constantly changing ecosystems by monitoring feedback loops and changing
strategies. The approach thus foregrounds interactions between human
interventions—such as commercial fishing—and dynamic ecosystems.
In parallel, attention has been drawn to the interdependence between
environmental processes and social institutions such as property regimes and the
organization of industry. In order to analyze such relationships, natural resource
management scholars developed the idea of “social-ecological systems,” defined as
“a bio-geophysical unit and its associated social actors and institutions” (Glaser et al.
2012: 4 cited in Brondízio et al. 2016: 188), as a framework for analyzing these
interrelated processes.
This concept, too, has become prominent within Earth Systems Science and
associated discourses. In a proposal for a revised planetary boundary for freshwater
consumption, for example, Dieter Gerten et al (2013: 556) argued for linking
biophysical and social-ecological analysis of food and water security and
environmental sustainability. Similarly, Claudia Pahl-Wostl et al’s (2013a: 345)
analysis of environmental flows and water governance aspired to increase “the
capacity of social-ecological systems to deal with uncertainty and surprise.”
In these formulations, we see Holling’s original call for adaptive management
placed in the context of systems that are at once social and ecological. Beyond
science, this novel combination has inspired new forms of policy discourse that
emphasize the importance of constant adjustment to changing environments.
As part of this transformation, it is also possible to detect a particular
translation of resilience. While Holling’s original definition centered on the capacity
of a system to absorb shocks while maintaining basic functions, Claudia Pahl-Wostl
et al speak of dealing with uncertainty and surprise. The environmental scientist Carl
Folke and his co-authors (2006: 253) characterize resilience as a “capacity for
renewal, re-organization and development.” And a popular brochure published by
Stockholm Resilience Centre (2015: 3) defines the term as a “the capacity of a system
to deal with change and continue to develop.”
In these updates, resilience has been augmented with features that include
learning, renewal and development, all of which occur in social-ecological (rather

9
than ‘purely’ ecological) systems. As Carl Folke et al (2006: 259) summarized: “the
concept of resilience in relation to social–ecological systems incorporates the idea of
adaptation, learning and self-organization in addition to the general ability to persist
disturbance. In this sense, the buffer capacity or robustness captures only one aspect
of resilience.”
Evidently, then, some figure of the social has gained an important role in these
reconfigurations of environmental knowledge.

Social Challenges
We might say that the social within Earth Systems science operates in several
registers. Conceptually, it works as a relatively abstract idea. For research, it
functions as an opening to particular kinds of collaboration. And in terms of research
outcomes and effects, it is elicited as a set of problems.
Above, we remarked on the expansion of resilience, which, once ecological
systems became social-ecological, ceased to be only about the curbing of disturbance,
and turned into a manner of speaking of social learning and of ways of dealing with
surprise. In some sense, this is simply indicative of the versatility of the systems
thinking imagination. To be sure certain relations, concepts, parameters or processes
may need tweaking, but in theory here is nothing inherently problematic about adding
social to ecological systems. In practice, however, the social addition is not always so
easy to manage.3
Once resilience expanded and transformed from its original emphasis on curbing
disturbance into a manner of speaking of social learning and ways of dealing with
surprise, it became integral to Future Earth’s novel approach to sustainable
development, in which social and environmental processes are imagined as
seamlessly connected.
The framework document of Future Earth represents this view in a “simple
conceptual model.” The model shows two boxes, “human well-being” and
“environmental changes,” both of which generate “drivers” of change. Research of
these transformations is visualized as a circle with themes—from modeling and

3
Although we do not pursue this line further, the addition of the social could be seen to
operate analogously to Jacques Derrida’s (1976) ”logic of supplementarity,” according to
which the original and ’natural’ emphasis (in this case ecological systems) turns out to
require a supplement (in this case social systems) the addition of which turns out to have
internally destabilizing effects on the system as a whole.

10
forecasting the Earth system to understanding and maintaining diversity, analyzing
government and institutions and understanding human behavior and culture—plotted
on the perimeter.
Although the diagram appears innocuous at first glance, upon closer
examination it has some curious features. For one thing, defining the social in terms
of systems does not in itself make it amenable to the same kinds of research,
modeling, or analysis, as the environmental components. For example, “governance”
and “water flows,” can obviously both be turned into objects of inquiry but hardly in
the same manner. Moreover, aside from being interrelated in a general sense, it is not
clear how “modeling the earth system,” and “understanding human behavior and
culture” can be rendered compatible as modes of understanding social-ecological
systems. The basic incongruence of the issues that these headlines refer to are not
overcome by putting them next to one another in similar-sized boxes. Indeed, as we
suggest later on, this can be seen as smoothing over the difficulty. The conceptual
model thus makes it hard to gauge what is “lost in translation” (cf. Fujimura 2011)
once the social becomes integrated in social-ecological systems research.
We can further observe that this diagram’s specification of the social as an
object of analysis co-exists rather awkwardly with another, in some sense far more
concrete, dimension of ‘the social.’ This latter form pertains to the practicalities of
Earth System Science and its proposals for action and reform.
As noted, questions including planetary boundaries, environmental risk and
climate disruption are central to this research agenda. Further, given the scale and
importance of these issues, Earth Systems scientists regularly attempt to influence
policy makers who conceivably have the means to push environmentally benign
agendas, yet routinely fail to do so.
With reference to this other scene of the social—not conceptual but practical—
frustrations are manifest, and they practically echo one another. Mark Stafford-Smith
et al (2012: 3) register “a growing gloom that global decision-making is failing to
keep up with the pace of change.” Though science has made “giant strides in
expanding knowledge on how our Earth system functions…we are failing in our new
role as planetary stewards, a role that is now crucial to sustaining human
development and, even, the survival of civilization as we have come to know it in the
benign environmental conditions of the past few millennia.” Claudia Pahl-Wostl et al
(2013b) find support in complex adaptive systems for the argument that: “missing

11
links in the trajectories of policy development is a major reason for the relative
ineffectiveness of global water governance.” She and her co-authors also identify
social factors rather than lack of knowledge as inhibiting effective governance (Pahl-
Wostl et al 2013a). And, noting that the implementation of integrated water resource
management is far from satisfactory (Pahl-Wostl et al 2013c), they call for a
“transition from knowledge to action” (708). This, however, will depend on
“coproduction of knowledge with stakeholders” (709), “cosmopolitan perspectives”
(713) and a willingness to reach consensus, which is evidently still lacking. Thus, it
appears that the ‘seamless integration,’ associated by the Future Earth team with the
notion of co-production is fraught with problems.
In short, then, one prominent location in which ‘the social’ emerges in the
practice of earth systems scientists is at the science-policy interface, with which the
science is itself recursively implicated. To wit: while social topics, including legal
frameworks, property regimes, community organization or resource management
practices and governance are all defined as part of social-ecological systems, the
obstacles Earth Science scientists encounter in trying to get their own
recommendations implemented as policy appear to somehow fall outside the scope of
analysis. In this specific sense the social in Earth System Science doubles: it appears
to be located at once inside and outside its own research framework.
This recursive relationship is significant for the practice of Earth System
Science, the aspiration of which, after all, is not only to understand social-ecological
dynamics but also to promote sustainable ways of inhabiting the planet in light of the
catastrophic environmental changes it predicts. But the conceptual diagram, which
offers a panoptic viewpoint of social and ecological sub-systems, renders this relation
invisible. Indeed it could be seen as indicative of an internal ambivalence, if not
contradiction, in the basic assumptions of Earth Systems Science. Even as it draws on
Holling’s notions of resilience and adaptive management—originally used to
challenge rational planning—the view of the social as an obstacle keeps in place key
technocratic assumptions from the supposedly disbanded paradigm.
As illustrated by Hannah Knox’s (2017) discussion of infrastructural planning,
this basically means that environmental problems are imagined as demarcated and
dealt with by science-based policy. There is thus an interesting incongruence in the
policy discourse of Future Earth. On the one hand, by drawing on remote sensing and
large-scale data analysis it clearly articulates the limits of the infrastructural mode of

12
planning. On the other hand, an instrumental view of policy that, pace Holling,
underestimates the dynamism of the social environment is kept firmly in place.

Into the Delta

The tricky question of the location and nature (so to speak) of the social is also
visible in empirical studies of social-ecological systems in the Chao Phraya and
Mekong deltas. At this scale, additional complexities arise, however, since social
scientists operate at local scales and approach the question in quite different ways.
In a general sense, geography has long been aware of the socio-ecological
interface. In 1963, J. A. Steers had argued that Mekong river basin development
comprised a mixture of “physical factors and political factors,” the management of
which depended on creating a broad outline for the entire river basin. Without such
an outline, he surmised, it would be impossible to achieve the triple goal of flood
control, power production and wildlife conservation. While the JICA irrigation
specialist Takashi Kawai (1983) rather uncritically celebrated the Mekong River
Committees’ (then) comprehensive “indicative basin plan,” a few years later the
sustainable development specialist Larry Lohmann (1990) contested the social and
ecological ignorance displayed by Western and Japanese businesses and agencies as
they went about “remaking the Mekong.”
Recently Earth system scientists entered this scene equipped with tools of
social-ecological analysis. Van Staveren et al (2018), for example, examined
“controlled seasonal flooding in long-term policy plans for the Vietnamese Mekong
delta.” Finding inspiration in studies by David Biggs et al (2009) that had depicted
the Mekong as a giant hydro-agricultural machine, these authors explored how
interacting social-ecological and technological systems produce trajectories for the
future delta. Examining social and environmental transformations as well as
changing policy orientations, they found that previous agendas centering on flood
prevention were slowly being replaced by an emphasis on the restoration of
controlled flooding and “greener forms of flood management” (van Staveren et al
2018: 22) seen to be more amenable to the delta’s long-term sustainability.
Meanwhile a different set of social-ecological delta studies took a
significantly more macroscopic view. In a study that compared the Mekong, Ganges-
Brahmaputra and Amazon regions, Szabo et al (2016) examined delta vulnerability
and environmental change through the lens of population dynamics. Conceptualizing

13
various links between the quality of ecosystem services, environmental hazards at
different time scales, and population dynamics, they concluded that the combination
of sea level rise and an aging Mekong population requires a rethinking of the relation
between public health and good environmental governance.
Barbosa et al (2016) used time-series data from official statistics and
monitoring programs along with Earth observation data to observe trends and drivers
of change in the same three deltas. In the Mekong, the key drivers were found to be
rapid economic development, changing land-use practices and salinity intrusion all of
which are “progressively putting more pressure on the delivery of important
provisioning services, such as rice and inland aquaculture production, which are key
sources of staple food, farm incomes, and export revenue” (2016: 555). Their
‘dynamic principal component analysis’ (561) indicates that the Mekong social-
ecological system “may have moved outside safe operating spaces into unsustainable
configurations” (568).
Along broadly similar lines, Ha et al (2018) drew on Holling’s resilience
theory to analyze the “Governance Conditions for Adaptive Freshwater Management
in the Mekong.” Like previously encountered arguments, adaptive management is
depicted as centering on social learning, experimentation and flexibility, qualities that
must be embedded in evolving governance structures, which are thus required to be:
“polycentric and horizontal with broad stakeholder participation” (Ha et al 2018:
117). Yet, even while advocating for the adoption of adaptive management, the study
also suggests that its prospects of success are limited, since the conditions for
successful adoption are not met. Ha et al., however, do not have anything substantial
to say about the practical conditions that manifestly impede the realization of
adaptive management.
In contrast, the wider socio-political processes that condition river management
has held the attention of political ecologists working on the Mekong and Chao Phraya
deltas for quite some time. Francois Molle (2007: 358) summarized the orientation of
political ecology as aiming “to identify and understand the mechanisms that underpin
the transformations of aquatic socio-environmental systems.” Similar to social-
ecological systems, river basins must therefore in principle be studied in their
hydrological, ecological and social dimensions simultaneously. This is exemplified
by Louis Lebel et al (2005) who insisted that management, decision-making and
science in the Mekong, must be analyzed as a “joint production of social and

14
biophysical processes.” Chris Sneddon and Coleen Fox (2006: 182), similarly,
developed an analysis of Mekong transboundary water flows with a view to
understanding how to “design and sustain institutions for equitable sharing.”
Like social-ecological systems researchers, Sneddon and Fox, too, aimed to
take into account both political and human-environment relations. Centrally, they
analyzed how ecohydrological dynamics are framed by river basin institutions that
“construct the object of co-operation” (183). The inseparability between
‘ecohydrology’ and decision-making was highlighted with their notion of “critical
hydropolitics,” and further echoed by Mira Käkönen and Philip Hirch (2009: 351)
whose study depicted the making of scientific facts by the Mekong River Committee
as part of “inherently political processes.”4 As this makes clear, political ecologists
have focused specifically on the making of institutional conditions that have often
been environmentally unfriendly. Doing so, they have also problematized the role of
diverse forms of science and technology within these political processes.
Around the mid 00s, the political dimension of water governance was thus
plainly visible to promoters of integrated water resource management in the Mekong.
Olli Varis et al (2008) depicted the “Mekong at a Crossroads,” due to rapid social,
economic and environmental transitions. Considering what “future routes” (146)
were available to avoid deterioration of the Mekong environments, they advocated
for stakeholder participation and good governance, above all with a view to ‘combat
fragmentation’ (147) in approaches across the basin, a struggle inhibited by the lack
of transparency in governance. In the same special issue of Ambio, calls for opening
up Mekong governance to academic expertise were complemented by calls for
improving data baselines and combining models to better understand the alteration of
flood regimes (Penny 2008). In parallel, the need for better models was highlighted
by Hoa et al (2008) whose study of the effects of infrastructure in the Vietnamese
Mekong delta concluded that flooding has a positive impact on agriculture albeit a
negative one on regional planning!

4
The title mimics James Ferguson’s (1990) classic The Anti-Politics Machine, which
described international development as a machine for turning political issues into technical
fixes, thus making ‘neutral expertise’ do political work. Similarly, MRC’s a-political stance
is depicted as a subterfuge that allows the organization to do political work through science.

15
 In our view, the juxtaposition of social-ecological analysis and political ecology
suggests an interesting figure-ground reversal. While social-ecological analysis
illuminates the complex relationship between bio-geochemical and institutional
processes, it eclipses the broader social and political contexts that shape these
institutional processes. Political ecology, of course, beams a light on just this shaded
area. But in doing so, it also reveals its own blind spot. While it convincingly shows
that science and knowledge are integral parts of political processes it generally has
little to say about the contents of this knowledge. For this reason, political-ecology is
unable to address the interlinkages between political institutions and the nonhuman
agency of sediment flows and bio-chemical processes.
In one sense, these viewpoints can be described as complementary. Yet,
combining them does not add up to a holistic image of the delta crisis.

The Social as Figure and Ground

If we consider the whole set of studies discussed above, a series of partial
connections and divergences come into view, which operate at once conceptually,
empirically and practically. Both political ecology and social-ecological systems
thinking recognize the relations between social and natural dimensions as crucial for
delta crises and the imagination of delta futures. But while the former foreground
how political frameworks and institutions shape the science and management of river
basins and deltas, the latter begin with models of natural systems to which they
progressively add social dimensions as diverse as population dynamics and
governance structures. In both cases, however, it can also be argued that connecting
the two domains covers over some important gaps.
In the case of social-ecological systems, the name itself gestures at some kind of
qualitative difference between the sides. The hyphen connects the ‘systems’ but
without providing the means to obviate their difference. This raises the double
question of what is gained by making the connection and what is lost in translation
(Fujimura 2011).
On this point, the way in which Earth Systems Science handles the social is quite
instructive. On the one hand, as Atsuro Morita and Wakana Suzuki (forthcoming)
have argued, this new scientific field can be seen as an experimental effort to “learn
to become affected” by planetary dynamics. The image it generates is one of delta
crisis as the slowly unfolding and basically unavoidable consequence of large-scale

16
infrastructure building and attendant entrapment of sedimentation across river basins.
Yet the distinctive ‘social’ issue that takes front seat in social-ecological arguments is
the problems this creates for governance, even though its own analysis indicates the
limited prospects good governance has for solving the issues it identifies.
The point of tension becomes particularly visible once the facts about the delta
crisis made available by these forms of modeling are ignored or deflected by those
who make decisions about delta management. Earth system scientists, it seems, rarely
find themselves in a situation where they can speak their truth to powers ready to
listen, or either willing or able to act.
Drawing on insights from political ecologists and STS scholars, we can observe
that one reason for this state of affairs is that, rather than finding themselves situated
at an interface where good science informs good governance, Earth Systems
scientists find themselves in a situation of radically conflicting political orientations.
Paradoxically, this is a situation that their way of modeling the social leaves them ill
equipped to make sense of.
In the Mekong context, for example, it is well established that planned dams are
highly likely to lead to a deterioration of the delta. But as political ecologists have
long demonstrated, for reasons of both national and transboundary politics, this fact is
of little consequence. After all, Laos, which aims to become ‘the battery of South-
East Asia,’ has no particular interest in the Mekong delta, which is located far away
in Vietnam. Dams known to be harmful to Southern Vietnam are still being built in
the northern part of the country. And although sedimentation flow is a well-
documented problem, Cambodian businesses continue to export large quantities of
sand from its rivers. The fact that this is against national legislation but nevertheless
tacitly accepted further indicates that there is no one-to-one relation between official
political positions and backstage agendas. All in all, the situation testifies to a wide
range of conflicting economic and political interests, well captured by terms such as
transboundary conflicts and critical hydropolitics. Yet not only are such relations and
processes difficult to either quantify or model, they also run counter to the idea of
rational decision-making on the basis of well-established facts. Falling into the gap
symbolized by the hyphen that connects the social and the ecological, they reappear
instead as concrete and recurrent problems of making research into policy.

From System Gaps to Sophisticated Conjunctions

17
Enabled by big data sets and new kinds of models, Earth Systems Science has
generated a compelling new image of the challenges facing deltas worldwide. This is
an image of delta transformations as an effect of multiple interlocked processes from
population dynamics and dam development to changing sedimentation flows and
coastal engineering. Meanwhile, in terms of ways of addressing these issues, Earth
Systems scientists put faith in adaptive governance.
On the one hand, this orientation to policy, while understandable, is also
curious, since its own analyses suggest the near-impossibility of circumventing delta
deterioration by anything less than a more or less complete undoing of modern
infrastructures. At the same time, this makes manifests internal tensions in how Earth
System science conceives of the social, and ways of acting on it. While adaptive
governance is invoked as an ideal, the repeated failure of policy to actually exhibit
characteristics such as flexibility and learning leads Earth Systems scientists to
lament its failure to conform to a quite different technocratic ideal, according to
which objective facts ought to guide rational decision-making. At issue, then, is also
difficulties in taking into account the recursive relation between knowledge and
politics, which scientists trying to intervene in the delta crisis finds themselves part
of.
Accordingly, we have suggested that social-ecological system thinking does
not really manage to encompass the social. Instead, its supposition that it does so, and
its aspiration to “seamlessly integrate” the social and the ecological, creates the blind
spots just mentioned. Simultaneously, this makes it more difficult for this emerging
field to fully take on board the understanding of co-production (of society, politics,
environments and scientific knowledge) developed within STS, even though this
would undoubtedly make it easier grapple with its own recursive implications in the
processes it describes and tries to intervene in.
This suggestion is prefigured by the ecologist and STS scholar Peter Taylor’s
(2011: 92) argument that a typical problem for researchers aiming to analyze systems
of “intersecting processes,” is their assumption of internally coherent dynamics and
their inability to deal with indeterminate boundaries between system components.
Taking a cue from his observation that “explanations that preserve heterogeneity of
causes and complexity of their inter-linkages warrant much more attention,” we
suggest that Earth Systems science analyses can also be enhanced if the
underspecified relations between social and ecological systems are replaced by more

18
sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge that preserve such heterogeneity and
complexity rather than aiming for seamless integration.
Here we might point to David Biggs et al’s notion of a “delta machine,”
consisting of numerous elements, ranging from management schemes and technical
solutions to water governance, to diverse ideas of adaptation and of disaster response
(Biggs et al 2009, Biggs 2012). In terms of illuminating the empirical complexity and
messiness entailed by co-production, there is much to gain from this and other
historically and ethnographically grounded studies. Crucial, also, the co-production
depicted is empirical and actual, rather than defined in terms of a normative
aspiration in which all knowledge forms come together and add up to a systemic
whole.
In terms of creating sophisticated conjunctions between diverse kinds of
social and natural science, not to mention between diverse forms of science and
policy, it is thus incumbent to let go of any idea of seamlessness. What is needed is
rather searching for strength in the diversity of methods, epistemologies and ways of
engaging bio-physical and infrastructural materialities, which characterizes existing
ecologies of knowledge. Akin to Holling’s depiction of multi-stable ecological
systems, the resulting image of science-policy relations is one of many-stranded,
partially related and, crucially, significantly uncontrollable processes.
As should be clear, these observations are not made in the spirit of a general
critique of Earth Systems science. Indeed, we find this field of inquiry to be
important in many ways, not least in its search for new ways of becoming affected by
planetary scale dynamics and its efforts to teach broader publics the importance of
such learning (Morita and Suzuki forthcoming). We are observing, simply, that
social-ecological systems rather than a panacea, is a particular mode of organizing
thought. As such, it does not hold the key to all the riddles of the delta crisis.
Inadvertently, as we have suggested, it may keep some of them out of sight.
In terms of sophisticated conjunctions, what is needed is therefore not more
integration but further recognition of, and perhaps even further differentiation of,
disciplinary and perspectival differences. Rather than clearly demarcated social and
ecological systems, we find ourselves amidst amorphous and historically changing
hybrids. And the same goes for forms of knowledge, which, as they emerge in
response to particular problems and concerns, do not conform to any general
scientific quest, amenable to integration. What is needed is not a flattening or

19
smoothing over of differences, but rather careful articulation of more sophisticated
conjunctions between the many forms of inquiry needed to think the challenges
facing deltas.

Towards Cosmo-Ecology
The notion of cosmo-ecology, developed by Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret
(2016) can be used to further pinpoint what we have in mind. In contrast to the view
of politics that informs social-ecological systems thinking (we might designate it as
adaptive governance + disappointed technocracy) but also in contrast to view of
political ecologists, for whom institutional power games are almost always at the
center of attention, cosmo-ecological politics entails paying attention to multiple
ways of being and “learning to hold possibilities open, learning attentiveness to the
infinite ways of being affected and of affecting” (Despret and Meuret 2016: 35, cf.
Spinoza 1958). From a cosmo-ecological perspective no one can claim full
knowledge of the kinds of forces and entities that will shape delta landscapes and
worlds with us, and this is precisely why sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge
and action are so important.
We can flesh out what this means with reference to delta studies, which open
up to these “infinite ways of being affected and of affecting” in quite different ways.
As we have seen, political ecology and social-ecological systems analyses of the
delta are in some sense complementary, since each sheds light on the other’s blind
spot. To these lines of inquiry, however, can be added several others, including
studies of Bangkok’s urban infrastructure and its intersection with the water flow and
ecosystem of the delta (Thaitakoo and McGrath 2010), of changes from water-
oriented urban planning to modern terrestrial urbanization (Morita 2016, Morita and
Jensen 2017), and environmental social histories of rice cultivation and state-making
in the delta (Ishii 1978).
In terms of cosmo-ecology, the important point is that these diverse delta
studies do not add up to any encompassing system. Rather, since each reveals aspects
that are unseen, or indeed impossible to see, from the perspective of others, they are
in a relation of mutual complication. Each simultaneously destabilizes the certainties
of others and generates new questions in the process. Earth System science’s
identification of sinking deltas across the planet can be used as an illustration of this
effect.

20
 Informed by political ecology, which elucidates how environmental science
becomes part of political struggles that pitch opposed interest against one another, we
previously noted that the recursive implication of Earth Systems science in policy
processes that it also aims to analyze, creates a blind spot in its own analyses. The
consequence of the uneasy relation between these analyses and the practical
government engagements pursued leads to the aforementioned doubling of the social
as both internal and external to social-ecological systems analysis.
Reversely, however, by bringing to light the long-term adverse social and
economic effects of modern water management, which—centering on structures like
dams and dikes, that trap sediments—lead to land subsidence, Earth Systems science
also makes clear that the delta crisis can really only be solved by a radically changed
infrastructural politics.
In turn, this has implications for social scientists that usually address the
question of politics in terms of institutions and mechanisms of participation and
deliberation. What the Earth Systems analysis makes clear is a need for far more
decentered forms of political analysis capable of taking into account material and
infrastructural agencies, and of dealing with significantly expanded spatial and
temporal scales of analysis.
In this sense, Earth system scientists’ failure to deliver recipes for solving the
delta crisis is arguably less significant than their partial success in widening
interdisciplinary debates about the delta crisis. Given that the one fundamental
solution—removing most water infrastructures—is both unacceptable and unfeasible
in the current social and political climate, we can hardly chide Earth Systems science
for ‘merely’ providing us with richer articulations of what needs to be taken into
account.
Even so, we can point to some important differences between the political
imagination of Earth System science and what is entailed by sophisticated
conjunctions of knowledge and action. As we have suggested, the Earth System
science literature remains deeply caught up in the modern mode of planning,
according to which scientific knowledge informs rational planning and execution.
But under actually existing socio-political conditions any straightforward execution
of such plans is impossible. This makes it important to reconsider the status of
scientific knowledge vis-à-vis politics, less with a view to criticizing its current
failures than to construct different images of how divergent forms of scientific

21
knowledge can be activated. While it seems clear that the view of science as recipe
for science-based policy action must be abandoned, this also opens a space for
different and more expansive articulations of how and where scientific knowledges
might make a cosmo-ecological difference.
Rather than seeing scientific facts as recipes, then, we might view them as
materials for imagining possible delta futures. With this in mind, sophisticated
conjunctions between forms of knowledge can serve to generate new visions and
ideas. By way of illustration, we consider the collaboration between the landscape
architecture Danai Thaitakoo and the urban designer Brian McGrath.
Drawing on landscape ecology, urban design, history and ethnography,
Thaitakoo and McGrath (2010) have studied ecological and hydrological aspects of
urban planning of Bangkok and how they relate to social life of the city. Yet, even
though they seriously engage with ecology, they are not in search of an encompassing
systemic view of Bangkok’s urban ecology. Instead, they continuously draw attention
to the entangled co-existence and dynamic interactions of multiple ecological
processes and infrastructural designs, and to their “infinite ways of being affected.”
We would thus say that they are both studying and doing cosmo-ecology.
In all likelihood, the experimental orientation towards conjunctions of
knowledge characteristic of this collaboration stem from the fact both Danai and
McGrath are designers. As a landscape architect and an urban designer, their interest
is not only to know Bangkok’s urban ecologies of Bangkok but also to materially
intervene in it. Indeed their writings are themselves conceived as performative; that is,
meant as provocations that will make it possible for others to see urban landscapes
and ecological processes differently. By drawing attention to fragments of sustainable
urban ecologies amidst the chaotic landscape of Bangkok, where urban
infrastructures are layered with the dynamic Chao Phraya Delta, they provide a sort
of catalogue of ideas and examples for architects and planners to imagine sustainable
water-centered urban landscapes (McGrath and Thaitakoo 2005).
Here we can observe quite a radical shift in how knowledge itself is conceived.
While Earth system scientists, as noted, tend to imagine knowledge as a kind of
recipe for achieving delta sustainability, Danai and McGraths depict it as an integral
part of “design ecologies.” Thus, McGrath (2013) emphasizes that urban ecological
design always unfold as part of webs of environmental, social and subjective
relations. Reflexively, he notes that: “urban design texts will be considered as part of

22
discursive ecologies.” Their aim is to generate new visions of urban design
concerning sustainability in a context of changing socio-natural relationships. This
means involving multiple human and nonhuman actors in design process that always
contain a significant element of surprise. Here, scientific findings such as complex
ecohydrological processes of the city or infrastructural impact on the deltas water
flow invites the authors to speculate about possible alternative futures for the city.5
By focusing on urban ecological design as acts of intervention in cosmo-
ecological webs rather than as detached observations of systems, McGrath and
Thaitakoo radically reposition the knowledge practices of science. In terms of
facilitating sophisticated conjunctions, we think their work has exemplary value, not
only in relation to urban ecologies but also for a cosmo-ecological expansion of the
parameters of the delta crisis.

Coda
Genesis, written by the philosopher Michel Serres, ends in search of the conditions of
“a new rationalism” with a section called “Dream.” Rather than aspiring to systemic
comprehensiveness, Serres’ ‘new rationalism’ would be premised on a many-sided
appreciation of contingency, diversity and gaps in comprehension. “It is always
assumed,” he wrote, “that multiplicities can, through various procedures, be
eliminated. I assume that they cannot be, I find that they cannot be, and I hope they
are not” (Serres 1997: 128). Our search for sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge
and practice for dealing with the delta crisis shares a similar sentiment. We might yet
reach a point where we no longer remember how difficult it once was to see multiple
forms of knowledge, society and politics, infrastructures and the varied properties of
deltas as fully co-produced. Together, they generate the cosmo-ecological effects and
affects of delta transformations on a constantly changing earth.

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