Bridges and Barriers to Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 201

Table 11.1 (c ontinued)

Major barriers and bridges to adaptation: Chile
Barriers Scale Bridges

Technical guidelines for declaration of drought are seen as
unclear, confusing, and obsolete yet basin managers are
limited in the ability to change the legal guidelines; also,
there is a mis-match between current hydro-climatic reality
and data upon which rights allocation is based; unclear about
meaning of certain sections of the provisions (e.g. con-
structed wells placed at the disposition of irrigators)

Leadership - recognition that technical improvements in
monitoring and assessment need to be made to help DGA
manage water resource more effectively (i.e. monitoring
should be more than 4x per year - but should be permanent,
constant and online)
At the basin level, there has been cross-sector collaboration
between agricultural stakeholders and mining companies,
driven by corporate social responsibility (CSR) interests of
the mining companies to improve management of water
resources in certain basins in Chile (e.g. Valle del Choapa,
Limari) - the Aconcagua informal agreements were
reported between individual Juntas and mining companies
in the upper watershed (mainly seemed to be payoffs for
mining impacts on water quality)
Emergency drought provisions allow the DGA to potentially
quickly call a drought situation and potentially secure fair
water allocation and prioritise water uses, to guarantee
water allocations to domestic use as well as irrigation, also
attempts to reduce the harmful impacts on agriculture by
reducing the amount of water for irrigation rather than
suspending it altogether;

Transference of water management to private actors (informality
of the regulation, e.g., DGAs lack of power to regulate illegal
water use) and institutional fragmentation (across DGA,
Ministry of Environment, Courts and DOH) means there is
less of an ability to generate a unified perspective on
planning for longer term large scale issues, such as climate
change impacts; mistrust & citizens' perception that often
DGA and other authority's intervention, undermine the
accuracy of water management further hamper ability to
provide coherent basin based guidance for new challenges
Lack of incentives for water conservation from private water
utility company perspective - tariff is renegotiated every
5 years, therefore any profit from efficiency gains are lost in
the next 5 year period. Focus on efficiency from pure profit
perspective narrows vision and limits ability to prepare for
alternative challenges - companies are still focussed on core
business of selling more water and increasing consumption -
but simultaneously have under invested in infrastructure
maintenance (so costs are rising for consumers, while the
private companies are experiencing more water losses due to
deteriorating infrastructure) - (UN ECLAC)