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 300

participation of affected actors in the canton itself has been based mainly on
consultation through commissions on the implementation of the project (COPIL/
COREPIL).
A more innovative approach that involved the co-production of knowledge across
multiple levels and stakeholders to develop the project, could help build cooperation
across currently disenfranchised stakeholders (Huntjens et al. 2010 ; Olsson et al.
2006 ). Investing this time (earlier on in the project) has shown, as have other stud-
ies, a need to develop understanding, learning and thus foster cooperation across
stakeholders when dealing with uncertainty and change, whether related to climate
change or other variables (Stubbs and Lemon 2001 ) .

14.2 Speeds and Scales of Change

While balancing flexibility and predictability is important to address the challenges
between structure and autonomy across administrative scales, it is equally important
to address adaptation to and preparedness for different scales of change as shown in
Fig. 14.3 below. A community or system's adaptiveness to local climate conditions
may not imply an ability to cope with changes or impacts at different speeds or
scales, as is evident across both cases. The adaptive actions associated with histori-
cal variability, drought and scarcity are limited in terms of upscaling to face more
complex challenges. Furthermore, in the Swiss case, perceptions of being well pre-
pared for tougher climatic conditions in the Valais (in comparison to other areas of
Switzerland) appear to lull sectors such as agriculture in particular into a false sense
of security that managing climate impacts will not require alternative solutions or
management approaches.
This is in keeping with other findings that suggest that adaptation to certain
stress conditions (drought/rain shadow effects) within one set of parameters
(historical variability) does not imply long-term adaptability to conditions
whose persistence and impacts will be more pervasive (Folke et al. 2010 ) . It also
reflects empirical evidence from other studies of river basins that suggest expe-
rience of one type of extreme can the limit preparations for another form of
extreme (Huntjens et al. 2010 ). Similarly, highly optimised tolerance theory
(HOT) posits that systems that tend to become very robust to frequent kinds of
disturbance may become fragile in relation to infrequent events (Carson and
Doyle 2000 ). While in the flooding events in the Swiss case, high-impact low-
frequency events are seen to have elicited a longer-term adaptive response to
changing conditions at multiple levels, a transition which the TRC is on the
cusp of. However, in other cases, events facilitate immediate adaptive behav-
iour, but fail to translate these smaller transformations into more permanently
adaptive regimes, such as the response to increasing drought conditions in the
Chilean case, local level responses to flooding events in the Swiss case (i.e. the
backlash against the TRC), and the response to drought periods such as 2003 in
the Swiss case.