Social and environmental sciences have shown that narratives have significant impact on human behaviour. Understanding water narratives can therefore help policy-makers understand and regulate public behaviour. We carry out a bibliometric analysis of water narratives, which gives us a broad overview of the types of work, collaborations and key insights. We couple this with a smaller qualitative review, which enabled us to construct a typology that captures the range of themes found in the literature. Narratives might be classified along an axis of expert and local knowledge and an axis of time – retrospective and prospective. We also show that narratives are a useful tool for legitimation and mobilization, and a form of “System 1” heuristic. Given that so many water challenges are tied to human activities, an understanding of water narratives and the link to behavioural change would be a useful part of future research agendas.

社会科学和环境科学表明，叙事对人类行为具有重大影响。因此，了解水的叙述可以帮助决策者了解和规范公众行为。我们对水的叙述进行了文献计量分析，从而使我们对工作的类型，合作和关键见解进行了广泛的概述。我们将其与较小的定性分析相结合，这使我们能够构建一种类型学，以捕获文献中发现的主题范围。叙事可以沿着专家和当地知识的轴以及时间的轴进行归类（回顾性和前瞻性）。我们还表明，叙事是合法化和动员的有用工具，是“系统1”启发式的一种形式。鉴于如此多的水资源挑战与人类活动息息相关，