Bridges and Barriers to Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 200

Scale Barriers Bridges

No long term visions/plan for a number of the most water
relevant institutions (e.g. CNR) for how to cope with
potential impacts from climate change
Lack of clarity around vision & priority setting for decision making
that hampers adaptation decisions around issues such as
allocations in increasing uncertain conditions, drought
situations; how to prioritise uses under increasing uncertainty
- transference of water management to private actors means
there is less of an ability to have a unified perspective on how to
deal with larger, more complex, issues such as climate change
The water code differentiates between surface and groundwaters
- lack of framework for subterranean waters, from both legal
and institutional perspective
Previous CNR led programmes for efficiency improvements
have now stopped - but replaced by a focus on increasing
transparency of rights situation

Growing number and strength of NGO initiatives which serve
to counter balance the pure economic interests in favour for
more SES oriented policies; non-formal/public education
initiatives also for top decision makers
External experts (World Bank, GTZ etc.) assist in improving
understanding and solution finding for water resource
management (e.g. GTZ WFD expert hired to work on
MMA's National Strategy for River Basin Management)
Ad hoc conferences from CNR on climate change impacts
awareness raising for policy makers, decision makers and
agricultural stakeholders (though not integrated systemi-
cally into planning, evaluation etc.)
Judicial Process - at the national level in the supreme court,
there is a judge specialised in the water code

Region
level

Highly centralised governance structure builds tensions between
political and ministerial levels and the technical and
operational functions at the basin level; also, technical
experts are left frustrated by slow moving and politically led
decision making on planning large infrastructural projects

Regional level technical and operational experts' cooperation
functions more effectively than political cooperation at the
national level; also, technical expertise is considered to be
high, including use of modelling for climate change impact
information

(continued)