Addressing Water Governance Challenges in the Anthropocene - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 8

Ostrom herself has noted that accelerating rates of change are a major challenge
in establishing sustainable institutions to manage such shared resources that
are open to public consumption (Ostrom et al. 1999 ). While this in part points to the
historic exclusion of ecological requirements in the governance system leading to
negative environmental impacts it also shows that the convergence of human induced
global change processes, such as climate change, with diverse governance challenges
(i.e. lack of clarity around existing water use rights and over-exploitation), is pushing
institutions and humanity in general, past those environmental thresholds beyond
which it becomes increasingly difficult to apply previous practices to future problems
(Kane and Yohe 2000 ). This calls for a new lens through which to assess the appro-
priateness of governance frameworks in a rapidly changing environment of increasingly
indeterminate risks. It also calls for suitably robust criteria to be established with
which to shape fitting responses.
In response to these increasing stresses on global hydrological resources, increasing
attention has been paid to the failure of governance in the water sector in the preced-
ing two decades. Investigations of different governance regimes and outcomes have
sought to pinpoint elements in a system which may produce more effective results
in creating 'good governance' (Rieu-Clarke et al. 2008 ) . Normatively the concept
appeals to the democratic advantages of broadening the participation base and the
durability of solutions which evolve through negotiation and cooperation by a
greater number of stakeholders. The frameworks which have arisen out of these
studies and research programmes have primarily centred on goal-specific approaches
such as integrated water resources management (IWRM), as inspired by the Dublin
Principles (Solanes and Gonzalez-Villareal 1999 ). While the focus on good gover-
nance and IWRM has provided a vital goal on which water managers could frame
solutions (UNECE 2009 ), a better understanding is needed of how relevant these
frameworks are in relation to the challenges induced by climate change.
Scholars and practitioners have therefore become increasingly critical of tra-
ditional command and control approaches for their rigidity and impracticable
goal of decreasing uncertainty (Johnson 1999 ). Instead, approaches that focus on
governance and management that is adaptive as well as integrative have been
posited as being more suitable to managing uncertainty (Engle et al. 2011 ) . This
has led in recent years to a number of the water resources and research commu-
nity to focus more heavily on better understanding adaptive processes, either in
relation to how systems have coped with past variability as well as shocks out-
side past and present coping ranges (Engle 2010 ; Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2010 ;
Huntjens et al. 2011 ; Pahl-Wostl 2007 ; Pahl-Wostl and Sendzimir 2005 ) . In the
past decade, there have been many more studies from the governance, adaptation
and resilience discourses that have sought to improve the baseline understanding
of adaptation and adaptive capacity in water governance regimes. Case evidence
has been used to suggest an increasingly converging set of criteria required to
foster adaptive processes (Dovers and Hezri 2010 ). Within the context of river
basins, it has been noted that more attention needs to be devoted to understanding
and managing the transition to more adaptive regimes that 'take into account
environmental, technological, economic, institutional and cultural characteristics
of the basin' (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007 , p 49).