Operationalising Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 259

accounts for social-ecological resilience. Despite the financial incentives, challenges
in negotiating the different frames of reference and priorities which stakeholders
bring with them to the TRC planning committees, has proved highly contentious
and time intensive so far, often to the final detriment of resilience based aspects of
the project. Moreover, as in Chile, changing climate is making the government
potentially more financially liable, as communes are hit by extreme events, the costs
of which they cannot cover. The event in 1993 caused damage that most of the com-
munes were unable to cover, requiring the canton to foot the bill for most of the
damage. The Swiss parliament has already started discussing the need for a consid-
erable increase in financial resources for protection against flooding and other natu-
ral hazards, likely to increase with climate change 5 (FOEN 2011 ) .
The challenges of coordination across policy frameworks and plans has already
been discussed under the Knowledge indicators, specifically in relation to the micro-
hydropower and environmental protection agendas. But this specific issue also
points to the issue of harmonising the competing interests through balanced nego-
tiations and participation. In the case of the TRC, stakeholder participation has not
diminished the generation of two competing fronts in the discourse. The field is
divided between the agricultural front who are unimpressed with the potential loss
of land (losers in the ecologicalisation of water management), and the politico-
technical and environmental front who favour heightened protection of the natural
environment as a means of boosting social-ecological resilience. While in the past
corrections, the technical engineering approach followed a harder path, the fact that
softer solutions are being sought in the TRC, means that a new equilibrium has been
reached, which is little consolation to those actors losing productive land.
Participation provides an arena for these voices to be heard and negotiate, but not
necessarily an efficient means of resolving such complex issues in an effective time
frame. 6
Interestingly, these issues suggest a very different form of mismatched authority
and agency in the Swiss case than in the Chilean. As a decentralised federalised
country, the federal administration may set the framework policies and rules, which
water management in the cantons and communes should adhere to, but this is lim-
ited to strategic guidance, direction and subsidies, while the communes (with less
technical and financial capacity) must maintain priority uses and provide solutions
in times of water scarcity. Furthermore, in the Valais, the strong autonomy of the
5 http://www.news.admin.ch/message/index.html?lang=de&msg-id=41748 (aftermath of 2011
fl ooding event); http://www.parlament.ch/d/suche/seiten/geschaefte.aspx?gesch_id=20083752
(Parliamentary discussions for financial period 2008-2011).
6 Refer to the comments from an engineer in the TRC: 'It is difficult because they are defending
their interests, but my feeling is that they are not really entering into the dialogue, nor are working
towards a compromise. We have proposed compensations to these people, but they don't really
want to talk, they just stay defending their alternative proposed solution. The process of trying to
reconcile these two different views in the participative process of the TRC takes up a significant
amount of time. We are working at the communal level as well to help the process along.'