Operationalising Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 250

quantity and quality aspects of watersheds. According to the DGA Director, the
following issues are priorities: designing and implementing special plans of audit-
ing; action plans at the regional level; training for users' organisations; registration
of authorised abstractions (to be able to clarify legal and illegal abstraction points);
effective systems of abstraction controls, with the obligation to inform the authority;
coordination and training with the public attorney, to develop better control and
investigation, in cases of infractions and water theft.
While these policy priorities point to a broadening of the informational focus
from within the DGA, further investigation would be needed to ensure that the goals
have been translated from intention to implementation. Interviews suggested that
across water experts in Chile, technical ability is high (though concerns were raised
about technical capacity of the MMA at the regional level) but the challenge resides
in the inclusion and matching of the technical capacity with where decision making
capacity lies. The focus on improving the state of the water market in Chile rests on
improving information and transparency of the market to improve its ability to
achieve efficient allocation, rather than improve the range of information and regu-
lations that inform market allocations that would account for a broader set of objec-
tives, including increasing the resilience of the social-ecological systems that are
impacted by the water market to adapt to changing hydrology.
Another example of this issue comes from the example of MIDEPLAN, the min-
istry in which projects are evaluated. MIDEPLAN is unable to evaluate projects
from a perspective other than the core mandate and purpose of the institution from
which it is being proposed. For example, the DOH can only present projects from
an irrigation perspective, the Ministry of Mines from a mining perspective, negating
any potential integration of benefits or indeed impacts. The challenge is not the level
of expertise in Chile, where hydrologists and engineers have the capacity to calcu-
late ecosystem demands and impacts according to water availability, but the paucity
of this information and its linkage to the actual rules of water management are det-
rimental to the holistic resilience of water management. In certain areas, namely
groundwater and ecosystem health, the irregularity of monitoring and absence of a
co-ordinated monitoring and observation network has led to a lack of data that
erodes the DGA's ability to manage the related water rights, especially to be able to
manage the groundwater rights during the declared drought periods, when ground-
water is more heavily exploited in the Aconcagua.
In the Chilean case, despite legal provisions to enforce obligations on monitoring
and abstraction controls, internal DGA guidelines on declaring restricted areas and
provisions that require user associations to be established for both groundwater and
surface water (requiring these associations to model and monitor abstraction levels)
(see Chap. 8 and Chap. 10 ), major challenges exist in their enforcement. The lack of
measurement of non-market based data, and the gaps in information concerning
water rights, are major impediments to the DGA's ability to effectively take control
of management during periods of declared drought, when they are expected to be
able to do so. In order to be able to mitigate or manage the effects of increased
droughts on water rights under climate change conditions, the inability to account
for the rights and usage that presently exists is a major limiting factor in the capacity