Water Governance in the Context of IWRM: Chile - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 149

In times of such extreme drought in other areas, water extractions are limited
to protect fragile ecosystems, in Chile, it seems the opposite. The economic and
market focus on water management has meant that public institutions responsible
for water rights management (DGA) or water and environmental issues have very
limited capacity to address water issues, yet the DGA is expected to step in at the
most extreme time of drought to manage water conflict as soon as the drought is
formally declared. Unsurprisingly, this has tended not to end well.

8.4 Summary of Chilean and Swiss Governance

in the IWRM Context

The descriptions and analysis in Chap. 7 provide a baseline understanding of the
governance systems relationship with sustainable water management, and can be
taken as a point of departure from which to develop a better understanding of adap-
tive capacity. The aim of the STRIVER/BRAHMATWINN indicator based approach
is to better understand how the governance systems can assist in the implementation
of IWRM. The full governance assessments provide a rich and detailed picture of
the governance framework in relation to IWRM and highlight the core challenges in
each case area to the development and implementation of an IWRM based approach.
While these full reports were developed for use in the ACQWA project, abbreviated
versions included in this topic provide a useful baseline from which to better under-
stand the governance context and associated challenges in adaptive capacity that
must be developed and mobilised. In addition, as highlighted in Chap. 4 , some
adaptation assessments have utilised these indicators as determinants of adaptive
capacity.
Despite the very contrasting legislative frameworks across the two cases,
significant challenges persist in each according to the indicators of IWRM. In the
Swiss case, despite better fulfilment of accountability, transparency and participa-
tion indicators, there remain institutional fragmentation and the challenges of imple-
menting federal policy at the local level of implementation. Furthermore, findings
from the Swiss case suggest that there may be a limit to the level of devolvement,
and that it can only be effective when combined with requisite levels of experience
and resources as well as a propensity for stakeholders to work across the other levels
of decision making. In Chile the key institutional challenges relate to the lack of
data and information on the market, challenges in holding water users to account
due to the lack of enforcement capacity and informality of the governance approach,
and finally significant barriers to integrating environmental and social consider-
ations in the water governance framework.
The analysis provides a useful baseline from which to explore factors affecting
adaptive capacity. Results from the governance assessment in the Swiss case area
showed that despite the water governance system performing well under the indica-
tors of accountability, transparency, participation, there are concerns about ability to
cope and adjust to a changing climate and rising competition for water use, mainly