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 310

this core tension across spatial and temporal scales through more nuanced indicators
that address both reactive and proactive adaptive capacity. In coping with shifts in
variability and increasingly recurrent extremes, institutions across the case areas
showed varying degrees of ability to mobilise for different kinds of shocks. The
development of the framework set out in the table and its underlying discussion
aims to contribute new and more nuanced insights into means of developing both
proactive and reactive adaptive capacity that contribute to both the growing body of
literature and practitioners alike. The structure proposed in Table 14.1 could be used
to develop adaptive capacity assessments that take these multi-scale challenges into
account, and help guide decision makers and water managers to develop adaptation
solutions that take both facets of adaptive capacity into account.
It is suggested that developing the capacity to both adapt proactively and mobil-
ise reactively to different scales or speeds of change frames adaptive capacity in a
way that focuses it both on the accommodation of uncertainty, as well as the short
and long term transformational potential within a governance system. Focussing on
the transformational potential of adaptive capacity should be about maintaining
options and choices where possible and recognising that passive, steady state, com-
mand and control approaches have tended to cut off options when the ambient cli-
mate changes. For example dykes can only go so high, reservoirs can spill over or
dry up if flows exceed or deplete beyond the parameters for which they were con-
structed. Pinpointing the elements of the governance system that enable more per-
sistent and transformative adaptive responses is a means to developing adaptive
capacity in order to create rather than minimise future water resources options. The
indicators developed and presented in Part III, and the multi-scale framework pre-
sented in this chapter presents an approach that could be further developed to enable
short term reactive capacity (e.g. crisis management, coping abilities) that would be
more consistent with more proactive strategies.
The approach aligns reactive and proactive in one framework so that short term
strategies would not counteract longer term proactive approaches that seek to main-
tain the resilience of the SES rather than exacerbate underlying challenges that poten-
tially limit adaptation to greater magnitudes of climate change in the future. Water
managers and adaptation planners would be well advised to pay closer attention to
these different aspects of developing and mobilising adaptive capacity, to ensure that
fostering one set of responses at one level, does not detract from or counteract effects
for another form at a different level, thereby limiting either short term reactive capac-
ity or longer term proactive capacity, both of which are equally important.
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