Addressing Water Governance Challenges in the Anthropocene - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 12

This calls for a better understanding of how governance systems adapt to climatic
stimuli. Other studies have shown that investigating how these systems have adapted
(or not) to recent past stresses from extreme events may allow us to draw lessons
about adaptive capacity to future climate change (Adger et al. 2007 ; Engle 2011 ;
IISD 2006 ); allowing managers to learn from what has already been done, success-
fully or unsuccessfully, to inform their decisions about what should be done. The
research presented in this topic aims to contribute to the conceptualisation and oper-
ationalisation of adaptive capacity in order to help bridge these conceptual gaps.
In so doing, it hopes to contribute a more nuanced conceptualisation and operation-
alisation of adaptive capacity, through better understanding how the governance
context and mechanisms within those frameworks contribute to an enabling envi-
ronment for adaptive capacity. It also seeks to better understand the challenges in
generating adaptive capacity across temporal and spatial scales and in so doing,
generate a framing of adaptive capacity that better serves policy and decision makers.
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