Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Governance and Resilience - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 39

management system to deal with uncertainty and surprise in relation to environmental
rather than societal issues (e.g. surprise in climate related shocks rather than chal-
lenges of implementation) while ensuring equitable and efficient allocation and prior-
itisation of uses are essential requirements for sustainable water resources management
in an age of enhanced rates of planetary climatic and environmental change. Therefore,
integrative management goals should be supplemented with adaptive goals that are
enabled through governance structures and management frameworks that not only
addresses challenges related to transparency, participation and cooperation but also
complexity, uncertainty and change (Pahl-Wostl 2007b ; Engle et al. 2011 ) .
Challenges in the implementation of both IWRM and AM approaches are both
documented in the research literature (Biswas 2004 ; Engle et al. 2011 ; Jewitt 2002 ;
Medema et al. 2008 ; Meinzen-Dick 2007 ). In IWRM, the challenges in achieving
an integrationist agenda are recognised as being major due in part to the timeframes
of policy and planning processes and limitations in institutional capacity at different
levels of governance (White 1998 ). In adaptive management institutional and organ-
isational technical barriers have been identified in relation to the resource and time
intensive process of developing, implementing and monitoring policy experiments
(Medema et al. 2008 ), as has the issue of scaling up results from case level projects
to river basins (Levine 2004 ). Tensions in between the two approaches also have
been identified, most notably in the balance between the search for flexibility and
experimentation in AM and for legitimacy through deliberative, participatory and
pluralistic forums in IWRM (Engle et al. 2011 ), which can take time to self-organise
to face new challenges.
Despite the challenges in both approaches, there has been an increasing trend to
combine aspects of the IWRM and AM approach, with the resultant AIM frame-
work. Adaptive and integrated water resources management (AIWM) is an approach
coined to propose a set of desirable characteristics for a system that encourages both
a holistic and participative approach to water management as well as designing and
learning from strategic interventions to address uncertainty and complexity in
social-ecological systems. AIWM therefore is described as an approach that empha-
sises 'polycentric governance with a broadly based constituency, cross-sector analy-
sis to support holistic understanding of system behaviour, transparent approaches to
communication and knowledge sharing, and diversified funding through private and
public sources' (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007b, c ). The NeWater project has recently
emphasised the need for these blended frameworks, focussing on adaptive gover-
nance, adaptive co-management for addressing complexity and uncertainty in cur-
rent and future water governance and management challenges (refer to newater.info
and Pahl-Wostl and Sendzimir 2005 ) .

3.3.1 The Role and Rule of Law in Adaptive Governance

Laws, regulations and other 'rules' associated with water resources are vitally
important elements of any governance system. Climate change has significant
ramifications for water law and governance (Tarlock 2009 ), yet, globally, there is