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 301

Therefore, it reaffirms findings from other studies of the potential for short sharp
shocks, such as trigger or focussing events, to become windows of opportunity for
transition to a new water course management philosophy (Folke 2006 ; Herrfahrdt-
Pähle 2010 ; Olsson et al. 2006 ). This in turn can enable more proactive adaptation
to longer term creeping system changes, such as gradual changes in mean precipita-
tion, changing seasonality and decreasing flows from glacier and snow melt.
Tompkins and Adger ( 2004 ) also recognise this dichtomy in adaptation, both grad-
ual and anticipatory as well as to single significant extreme events or shocks. But
they add that both forms of adaptation should 'involve encouraging the evolution of
new institutions that are sensitive to the resilience of the ecosystems they are man-
aging and knowledgeable about the specific nature of the risks of climate change'
(Tompkins and Adger 2004 , p 10).
However the presence of capacity to adapt to one off events may not engender
the mobilisation of capacity to respond to more gradual yet in the long run significant
forms of change, as seen by the dichotomy of responses to inter-annual droughts in
the Chilean case and the drier climate in the Swiss case in comparison to the more
complex, inter-related and anticipatory changes to climate impacts on seasonality,
variability and availability.
In the Swiss case, while the windows of opportunity that the flooding events
opened were capitalised on, the rapid fading of the memory of those impacts high-
lights the importance of knowledge (information and communication) indicators, to
ensure that both individual and institutional memory is maintained. Integrating
opposing stakeholders into the tight communication and knowledge networks could
be one means of finding more cohesive stakeholder acceptance of the implementa-
tion plan in a faster manner than the current top down communication and participa-
tion strategy that is in place through the newsletters and COREPIL. In the Chilean
case, the high impact recent drought events, potentially, are providing a window of
opportunity for a heightened level of self-questioning and stakeholder cooperation
and collaboration to move beyond just the technical engineering solutions to secu-
rity and supply challenges, but to also better enable the institutional setting to cope
with increased drought impacts so that the resilience of the SES does not further
degrade.
The informality of the Chilean approach grants freedom and autonomy to the
user level to quickly react and find solutions to smaller issues (tourno). However,
these changes and coping techniques (increased groundwater abstraction) have the
potential for longer term degradation of the resilience of the ecosystem. The Chilean
system is also characterised by high levels of mistrust between sectors and institu-
tions that not only hamper the implementation of reactive adaptations but disince-
tivise collaboration across sectors and levels for solutions to the larger more complex
issues. A focus could therefore be on enhancing the reactive elements of the system,
but paying closer attention to how elements in the knowledge network indicators
could improve proactive adaptation and lead to positive rather than negative trans-
formation (more on this further down).