Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Governance and Resilience - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 30

exacerbates underlying variation, rendering future situations less manageable and
less predictable (IISD 2006 ). Thus, as climatological and hydrological patterns shift
from one set of parameters to a wider range of uncertainty and risks (as shown by
the vertical arrows), the theoretical paradigms that inform water management are
also shifting.
Water governance and management systems tend to have rules or tools to cope
with normal ranges of uncertainties, or moderate deviations from the norm, such as
wet years followed by dry years on an inter-annual or decadal timescale (Smit and
Wandel 2006 ; Yohe and Tol 2002 ). For example, from a governance perspective,
prioritisation rules may kick in when indicators suggest a dry year is underway.
From a management perspective, reservoir storage could tie over water provision
during dry years, or flood management strategies such as dykes and early warning
systems might protect against high precipitation events (Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2010b ;
Huntjens et al. 2011 ; Smit and Wandel 2006 ) .
However, climate change embodies a more unpredictable uncertainty or irrevers-
ible changes in state (reduced run off contribution from glacier and snow melt, shifts
in seasonality, increasingly consecutive dry years) that may lie outside the coping
ranges, or beyond the boundaries of past and present coping ranges of water man-
agement and governance regimes 1 (Smit and Wandel 2006 ; Yohe and Tol 2002 ) .
Stakhiva and Stewart ( 2010 ) note that the 'big and intractable difference is the much
increased degree of uncertainty when dealing with climate change, uncertainty that
requires implementing certain strategies that incorporate more redundancy into
connected systems, thereby increasing reliability and robustness' (Stakhiva and
Stewart 2010 , p 107).
Traditional governance or management approaches have been criticised as being
characterised by a command and control paradigm and fragmented regulatory and
institutional landscapes (Gleick 2003 ; Pahl-Wostl 2009 ) that do not take the com-
plex inter-linkages of the SESs for which they are responsible into account and seek
to reduce uncertainty rather than attempt to manage and live with it. For example,
ministries and regulation often are siloed along sectoral lines, while rulemaking on
water resources does not take into account the needs, challenges and reality at the
local level. Command and control is not limited to the governance of the social
system, but also of the bio-physical system, where management approaches have
favoured the control of the hydrological cycle (i.e. dam construction, dyke enforce-
ment) in order to reduce natural threats and produce more predictable outcomes
(Jewitt 2002 ). This form of approach is seen as reducing the natural range of variation,
impacting riparian ecosystems and their services, and thus reducing the resilience of
the system (Jewitt 2002 ) .
1 Adaptive capacity has been analyzed in various ways, including via thresholds and “'coping
ranges'”, defined by the conditions that a system can deal with, accommodate, adapt to, and
recover from (de Loe and Kreutzwiser, 2000; Jones, 2001; Smit et al. 2000; Smit and Pilifosova,
2001, 2003). Most communities and sectors can cope with (or adapt to) normal climatic conditions
and moderate deviations from the norm, but exposures involving extreme events that may lie out-
side the coping range, or may exceed the adaptive capacity of the community (Smit and Wandel
2006 , p 287).