Operationalising Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 251

to adapt. This incompleteness of knowledge is mirrored in the relative weighting of
economic and environmental issues in the legislative process. Quality and water
management rules are set by analysing the economic implication of the proposed
rule on the relevant sectors (agriculture, mining and hydro-electricity). It is the
responsibility of the department of economic analysis in the MMA to assess pro-
posed rules (according to the planning standards imposed by the Ministry of
Planning - MIDEPLAN) with a social discount rate of 6 %. 1 If the economic costs
are measured to be too high (according to the equation used) then the new rule will
not be passed by through the political route.
Another facet to the knowledge related challenges in the Chilean case, are the
tensions between the legal and technical spheres of knowledge and agency and the
political or administrative. One manifestation of this is the impotence of the DGA
to mediate issues between rights holders in a basin, and the resulting role of the
judiciary in conflict resolution. The judicialisation of environmental management
has meant that judges, who lack expertise on hydrological or environmental matters,
dictate precedents in water resources management at the watershed or national level.
There is a chasm between the level of expertise in political and technical decision
making, yet there is an ineffective separation of political from technical matters, that
handcuffs and frustrates the operational level, weakening their ability to provide
workable solutions to mounting challenges at the basin level.
The positive emergence of a plan to implement a set of environmental courts
(proposed in conjunction with the emergence of the MMA out of CONAMA) is also
likely to be hampered by capacity constraints in expertise. Such courts could be a
vital tool to develop more effective and expedient conflict resolution, particularly in
periods of drought. However, a long term effort would be required in training and
capacity building within the judiciary for such tribunals to approach water conflicts
with a more holistic knowledge of the system characteristics, rather than a shallow
formal interpretation of the Water Code, which is overbearingly influenced by
economics.
Climate change is being observed across Chile, mainly through the reduction in
glaciers and snow pack, which is matched by almost all interviewees recognising
that decreasing water availability in the Aconcagua and most regions in central and
northern Chile will require improvements in the organisation of water management,
the information that informs it, and the ability to settle disputes, in order to avoid
mounting conflicts. The DGA recently initiated a glacier monitoring programme;
there is a general lack of data that would be required to manage climate change
impacts, including water rights information, water availability, riparian ecosystem
health; but the integration of climate scenarios into water resources planning, both
infrastructure and rights management, within the Aconcagua is currently not taking
place. However, across the specific sectors, climate change impact studies have
taken place (either by the ministries themselves or academia) and there is an
1 For comparison the Stern Report used 2%, while Nordhaus used 3% (OECD 1997 ) .