The Assessment of Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 65

whether adaptation should lead to robust and resilient governance frameworks, or
flexible and adaptive ones, or somewhere in between. Can an SES be both resilient
and yet able to transform to be adaptable to new challenges and hydro-climatic
realities? Where are the trade-offs implicit in the generation of institutional charac-
teristics needed for climate resilient structures and adaptive elements. If we do presume
that both robustness and transformative characteristics are desirable, then there is a
need for cross case comparisons to show how these might be balanced and not
mutually exclusive as well as to identify the means of negotiating and navigating
these tensions within the governance framework.
There has been a set of incremental shifts in the focus on how to achieve better
water management outcomes, from governance approaches that focus on the state,
then the market, then decentralised role of user groups (Meinzen-Dick 2007 ) . In the
face of a number of converging disturbances in SESs, biodiversity loss, population
growth and economic development, attention more recently turned to understanding
governance approaches that fostered adaptability in water governance regimes.
Generally, the bodies of research that have focussed on this issue have proposed that
more flexible, participatory, collaborative, and learning-based designs and
approaches will increase adaptive capacity and sustainability of water systems
(Cromwell et al. 2007 ; Kallis et al. 2006 ; Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007b ) . Yet, scholars
have also stressed the importance of acknowledging the difficulty in establishing
links between concepts and management paradigms such as IWRM, adaptive man-
agement and adaptive governance with proven positive results in reality (Huitema
et al. 2009 ; Medema et al. 2008 ) .
In order to examine and define the underlying process that will enable gover-
nance regimes to respond to the challenges of the anthropocene, the concept of
adaptive capacity has been used to refer to the latent conditions required for enabling
successful and sustainable adaptation. The presence of adaptive capacity should
allow a system to prepare for and adjust to the exposure of a stress, thereby reducing
sensitivity and potentially embracing opportunities presented by that risk to not
only adapt, but potentially transform to a new more sustainable pathway. In the field
of resilience, adaptive capacity represents a more multi-faceted concept, both an
ability to absorb shocks to maintain the system state, but also to facilitate transfor-
mations or transitions to a new, more desirable state.
For the purposes of this piece of research, adaptive capacity is conceptualised in
relation to its role in the transformation potential of a system to a more stable and
sustainable state as a means to absorb future shocks and uncertainty, thereby creating
not limiting future adaptation choices. Thus, adaptive capacity should enable the
system to prepare for, respond to and cope with challenges such as variability,
uncertainty and surprise. The accommodation of uncertainty should enable the
system to not constrain future options (creating choices), couching the understanding
of adaptive capacity in the context of stationarity argument. Building adaptive
capacity, by cultivating or contributing to the presence of its determinants in an
SES, should therefore improve the ability of that SES to be resilient to surprises
and larger scale changes, by proactive and reactively shaping positive responses,
including transformations or transitions to a better state.