The Assessment of Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 61

WB 2002 ). However, other studies note the fact that decentralisation and participation
per se are not a priori requirements for better management and enhanced resilience.
Berkes in Nelson et al. ( 2007 , p 409) suggests that 'the balance of evidence shows that
neither purely local level management nor purely higher level management works
well by itself', and Lemos and Agrawal ( 2006 ) highlight the development of emerg-
ing hybrid, multilevel and cross-sector forms of environmental governance.
Fourth, Ingram ( 2011 , p 8) adds that 'participation is no panacea for water
conflicts'. Other studies such as Iza and Stein ( 2009 ) elaborate that other factors such
as coordination across levels, rather than pure participation and decentralisation hold
significant importance. Thus, there is need to look beyond prescriptive norms such as
participation and decentralisation and subsidiarity, to more exploratory indicators
which allow examination of causal relationships between different indicators and
adaptive capacity within different sectors as well as governance regimes.
Fifth and finally, in a number of studies the indicator of transparency is pinpointed
as fundamental to good governance and adaptive capacity. However, drawing on
studies and publications in the resilience framework and the wider climate dialogue,
it might be worth broadening out from the normative prescription of transparency to
a more thorough exploration of the contribution that different forms of knowledge
and information play in enhancing resilience. By looking at knowledge as well, we
therefore refer to not just scientific information and data (hydrological models,
climate models, economic statistics etc.), but can also recognise the potential impor-
tance of local and indigenous knowledge. A recent report from Switzerland
comments on the need to take into account and integrate traditional knowledge in
climate data systems (Lugon 2010 ) .
An awareness of the need for climate services also arose out of the 3rd World
Climate Change Conference in Geneva (WCC-3 2009 ), which refers to the provi-
sion of climate information (both current climate variability and recent and future
climate change) (Lugon 2010 ). It also calls for better management, communication
and understanding of this information so that resource managers and the public
alike can actually generate knowledge out of the wealth of data and information
available. The HEID report comments that while today, people are likely to be inun-
dated with information, often 'the hurdles are not the hard science but the commu-
nication' (Lugon 2010 , p 64). It also notes that climate information per se is not
enough; to be truly valuable it needs to be integrated with socio-economic and other
environmental data. It is therefore important to investigate not just what kind of
information decision makers are getting, but also how they use it, with whom do
they share it and how relevant is it to the problem they need to resolve.

4.5 Developing the Approach

The understanding that past management approaches have led to a minimisation of
choices through steady state resource management (Milly et al. 2008 ) and a focus
on hard infrastructure and technical solutions (Gleick 2003 ) , can be counter balanced