Environmental Engineering Reference
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across the different sectors, decision makers should aim to simultaneously invest in
bottom-up (community adaptation planning, integration of climate impacts into
longer-term planning, and adaptive capacity assessments) and top-down efforts
(national and regional level technical, strategic and financial support systems, long-
term planning requirements, investment in shared scientific and adaptation data-
bases, mechanisms for cross-region, cross-sector learning) as an initial step for
joining up segregated and contradictory policy priorities across water stakeholders.
Table
14.1
builds upon these ideas, by presenting a multi-scale framework to address
the challenge and tensions implicit in adaptive capacity through more practical
institutional mechanisms.
Table
14.1
draws on and develops from the framework set out in IPCC (
2001
)
and Tompkins and Adger (
2005
, p 566). Proactive approaches relate to taking the
longer term view through a number of approaches including planning process and
guidelines, policy and legal frameworks that represent long-term and iterative pro-
cesses that can integrate new information as it manifests. Reactive approaches relate
to flexible mechanisms and networks that can rapidly respond with quick innova-
tions and transformations to minimise short and long term damage from specific
events.
At the national or federal level, a focus on both vertical and horizontal integra-
tion has been suggested. From a proactive perspective, efforts could be directed to
providing stability in change, partnering ministries or federal administrative bodies
to set more integrative policies on the basis of sound environmental and climate
information. This process could be enabled by formalising knowledge relationships
with appropriate bodies; in some contexts this might be intergovernmental bodies,
in other NGOs or in other research institutes and universities. More formal inter-
disciplinary partnerships for policy setting would allow for a broader mix of infor-
mation and knowledge (beyond traditional disciplines of lawyers and engineers) to
inform the development or revision of legislation and regulation.
One evident challenge is that while policy should inform legislative develop-
ments, in governance contexts such as Chile and Switzerland, this can be a time-
consuming and in some cases fruitless task. In Chile, the constricted and dogmatic
nature of political dialogue on the Water Code and water resources reform limits the
scope for addressing climate challenges through formal legislative change and
reform. In the shorter term, it is worth focussing on the more dynamic elements of
the system, i.e. informal elements and those that relate to knowledge and network
indicators to foster approaches that are better equipped for quickly dealing with the
challenges relating to climate change.
In Switzerland, evidence shows how federal policy making does filter into fed-
eral and cantonal legilsation. However, the timescales over which these policy pri-
orities trickle down into actual rules at the canton and local level
2
can take years or
decades, and even then, the autonomy of the communes can impede the effective
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