Addressing Water Governance Challenges in the Anthropocene - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 7

takes place (Adger et al. 2005 ), requiring the institutions these regimes define to be
simultaneously both climate adaptive and yet able to drive sustainable adaptation
efforts. To respond to this dual challenge, the water resources and research com-
munity have in recent years focussed more heavily on better understanding adaptive
governance processes for sustainable water resources management.
The recognition of an anthropocene requires the water research community to
focus more heavily on strategies that would effectively manage water resources in
the context of a new epoch. Thus it signals the need to shift attention from assessing
and shaping responses in order to avoid over-exploitation of resources to also
include dealing with uncertainty under changing climatic conditions. Therefore,
when investigating water resource issues, it is vital to recognise and take into account
the complex inter-connected and multi-functional role that water resources serve for
healthy ecosystems, societies and economies, and thus the ability for humankind to
stay within the bio-physical preconditions that are necessary for our own develop-
ment and well-being (Rockstrom et al. 2009 ) .

1.2 Shifting Lens: Sustainability to Adaptability

In his seminal topic 'On the Origin of Species', Darwin famously noted that “It is
not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change” (Darwin 1859 ) . This observation
perfectly elucidates how humans have always had to adapt to change, including
climatic and meteorological variation. So what is different now? Why do we worry
so much about society's ability to adapt to future variation in the twenty-fi rst century?
The answer to this can be found by looking at the speed of current climatic change,
and the complex geo-political-environmental context within which it is and will
take place. Current rates of change and the increasing global, rather than local, drivers
of concatenating shocks (Biggs et al. 2011 ) have meant that a more concerted effort
must be placed on creating an enabling environment for adaptive capacity to accel-
erating rates of change in today's more complex and interconnected world.
Discussions around resource based institutions have held prominent place since
Hardin argued in his seminal paper 'The Tragedy of the Commons' (Hardin 1968 ) ,
that resource users in shared resource extraction and use systems, are inevitably
locked into the trap of destroying the resource on which they depend. In the preced-
ing 40 years, much of the debate around institutional arrangements for resource
management has been pinned on whether or not this 'tragedy of the commons'
prophesy is universally true, or if enough examples can be found to counter argue
the proposition (Ostrom et al. 1999 ), identifying favourable institutional processes
that resolved these shared resource problems. While Hardin proposed polarised
solutions of either socialism or privatisation of free enterprise, Ostrom continues to
chart a number of alternative methods of restricting access and creating incentives
that resolve over-exploitation issues related to shared resources that are open to
public consumption (e.g., fisheries catchment quotas, local forest management
practices, and water allocation agreements to name a few).