Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Governance
and Resilience
Abstract
Different challenges arising from increasingly uncertain and unpredictable
hydro-climatic conditions have been accompanied by a shifting focus of water gov-
ernance solutions. More recently, the water resources research community has paid
increasingly close attention to climate change adaptation and adaptive processes in
relation to water governance, recognizing the need to better understand adaptive
processes that seek to embrace, rather than control uncertainty. This chapter presents
these issues and introduces the linked concepts of adaptive capacity, adaptive
governance and resilience in social ecological systems. It provides a review of how
these topics approach the challenges presented in previous chapters, and how schol-
ars have sought to develop these frameworks to better take into account the need to
foster and mobilise adaptive capacity within water governance structures.
Keywords
Adaptive capacity of water governance Resilience of social ecological
systems Managing increasing uncertainty Climate resilient water management
Climate change challenges for water institutions Adaptation to hydro-climatic
changes
3.1
New Approaches for New Challenges: Integrating Uncertainty
and Climate Change
The previous chapter discussed the internal and external pressures on governance
systems, for which good governance and IWRM prescriptions have sought to pro-
vide solutions. External influences include physical climate factors, which pose
novel risks on societies, even though many have long demonstrated adaptive prac-
tices. Climate change was discussed earlier as the 'great accelerator' of processes of
change and 'threat multiplier' (Downing
2009
) pushing systems past environmental
thresholds, in terms of droughts, glacial retreat and heat waves. Some scholars have
argued that the speed of such change is leaving governance systems increasingly
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