Balancing Structural Con fl icts Across Scales to Develop and Mobilise Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 291

in extreme events with the requisite flexibility for local actors to react and plan
according to their individual needs.
While clarity in rules and legal certainty is fundamental for accountability in water
governance (see Part II), it can also lock ownership and use rights into codified norms
that are based on out of date hydrological data and patterns. In terms of evidence in
'responsibility', coordinating and organising institutions are needed for inter- connected
water policy and management particularly in the face of complex and uncertain chal-
lenges. But there is a need to recognise local individualities and needs, which can go
unconsidered at higher levels of administration. While participative processes can
address this dichotomy, they can also stall agreements on projects and frustrate mul-
tiple stakeholders (especially if not matched with requisite knowledge and informa-
tion assets). Other studies have discussed similar challenges in relation to balancing
legitimacy and accountability through IWRM based approaches with adaptive man-
agement criteria of flexibility, experimentation and self-organisation (Engle et al.
2011 ). Indeed, this trade-off is elucidated in their comparison of IWRM and adaptive
management criteria in the case of Brazilian water governance. Engle et al. ( 2011 )
found that 'centralization of decisions in the hands of the technical agency may facili-
tate the implementation of experiments as well as afford a level of flexibility that may
be incompatible with more decentralized systems'.
Evidence from the 'preparedness' indicators suggests that the rules at higher
levels that guide stakeholders at lower levels for managing extreme hydrologi-
cal situations need not only to take the local reality into account, but also be
matched with capacity at local levels so that provisions can be effectively inter-
preted and implemented. Finally, all three indicators reveal evidence for the
struggle to find a balance between autonomy and strength of user rights for
managing their resource, while holding disparate actors together through a for-
malised set of enforceable provisions that allow for the sustainable management
of the resource and bring actors together to resolve common problems. High
levels of informality may devolve agency to lower levels, but if this is not
matched with guidance, incentives and the requisite knowledge to cooperate on
complex challenges, it is associated with policies that lead to the passive degra-
dation of the SES.
The challenge through both these preparatory and reaction periods represent a
balancing of the trade off between flexibility and predictability to optimise adaptive
capacity. It may be described as the search for juggling structure, guidance, and
policy certainty at higher administrative scales, in a manner that also facilitates and
supports autonomous adaptations at local levels. Succesfully balancing this trade-
off could help to maintain the ability of a governance approach to allow for both
reactive and proactive adaptive capacity to be built and mobilised. To reiterate from
earlier discussion, while reactive and autonomous adaptation is the ability to change
and adapt to new threats or realities that have manifested (Tompkins and Adger
2005 ), proactive adaptation can in turn be categorised as longer term preparations
for different scales of change.
Flexibility can be seen as short term transformation potential, i.e. the ability to
change course, reorganise, and mobilise quickly if the SES is on an unsustainable