Assessing Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 286

- Linkage of environmental provisions within these laws and environmental goals

with subsidy programmes and economic incentives.

Knowledge

- Elongated and iterative planning time horizons, enabled through a diverse range

of impact studies and multi-stakeholder investigations to allow for compromise
and balance in the project.
Integration of climate change adjusted risk and uncertainty into planning, -

acknowledging that current levels of flows may be surpassed in the future.
Flexibility allowed through the implementation plan so that the technical experts, -

rather than politicians, can define the planning process.
Scientific and technical monitoring and modelling are relied upon to diagnose -

vulnerabilities, and communication programmes intended to translate the out-
come studies into justifications for the project with local level stakeholders.

Networks

- Reliance on federal financial support allows the federal level (more transforma-

tive approach) to have some power, but regional particularities and needs are
accounted for through the decentralised implementation structure.
Each scale has its own source of power and agency leading to an extenuated

-

impasse in passing the implementation plan, but the potential to negotiate a com-
mon, integrated solution.
While more passive approaches were associated with the following governance
mechanisms:

Regime

- Drought declaration supports coping but allows further exploitation of 'vulnera-

ble' ground water sources.
Informality of water governance in 'normal' periods associated with a lack of capac- -

ity and knowledge in institutions that are called upon for drought management.
Legal guidelines exist for the management of increasing flooding issues (govern- -

mental policy guidance), but there is a void of guidance and rules on scarcity or
stress.

Knowledge

- No requirement to account for uncertainty through climate change impacts or

inter-annual variability.
Loss of knowledge during drought interventions, since government actors lack -

the capacity and familiarity of the basin.
Lack of coherence across different evaluations and assessments of the hydrologi- -

cal resources available limits the ability of both public agencies and private actors
to agree on basin planning.
Strong awareness amongst water owners that hydrological patterns are shifting -

has not translated to enhanced use of technology, monitoring, modelling or