Operationalising Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 256

to finance infrastructure for groundwater exploitation (by the DGA) to cope with
lower surface flows and subsidies for water infrastructure including both large scale
dams (by the DOH) and smaller farm scale irrigation efficiency improvements (by
the CNR).
While subsidies exist for the construction of water infrastructure (Water Code,
Art. 1123), operation and maintenance is left in the hands of the irrigators. The
state invests in the construction of infrastructure, transferring it to the private
rights owners once complete. When the title passes to the farmers on a newly built
irrigation project, a financing agreement is put in place so that over 25 years, for
example, farmers pay for the infrastructure, and the water rights belong to the
farmers themselves. According to interviews at the DOH, a new law is in prepara-
tion with respect to enhancing sustainability in such projects. However, in terms
of operation and maintenance, many of the water canals in the Aconcagua Basin
(particularly some of the longer ones such as the Waddington that stretches over
100 km) have high leakage rates, with irrigators at the end of the line often not
receiving any portion of their rights allocation due to evapotranspiration and leak-
ages along the way, reinforcing and heightening the impacts experienced during
drought periods.
It is not just financial assistance that can be fruitful in fixing some of the underly-
ing challenges to sustainable water management, but capacity building programmes
also can play an important role, as learning networks and knowledge exchange can
open up the possibilities of applying lessons learnt from one area for innovative
approaches to challenges in another. Capacity programmes run by CORFO provide
farmers (as well as other sectors) with the opportunity for foreign travel to learn
more about techniques and technologies for specific areas of interest. Within the
case areas, one stakeholder referred to such a sponsored trip to France as highlight-
ing for him the value of basin organisations for conflict resolution. This suggests
that while national institutions see the value that knowledge exchange can have and
the importance of developing learning networks for capacity building, the mecha-
nisms to share and integrate accumulated knowledge are lacking. This leads to a
failure to translate new insights from external cases to complex challenges within
the basin.
The DGA has committed to strengthening the level of expertise and the range of
knowledge in the water user associations and their empowerment for using it in
dispute settlement and eventually become stronger partners to the DGA in its own
mandate to efficiently manage the distribution of water resources. However, clashes
between the authority of different government organisations and the agency and
autonomy of rights owners at different levels and sectors are one of the defining
challenges in the Chilean case. The public authorities in Chile at the regional level
are limited in their ability to actively engage in the management of the resource. The
DGA, effectively, can administer the allocation of water rights (according to avail-
ability) and record the transference of rights in the market. Water management is
thereby transferred to the private sector, and the independence and autonomy that
this grants water users is not matched in incentives for enhancing levels of coopera-
tion between them.