The Assessment of Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 66

Conversely, the lack of adaptive capacity would lead to a narrowing of future
choices (minimising choices), for example through a dominance of hard technical
measures which are difficult to reverse when future hydrological or consumption
patterns do not follow the decision maker's calculations. This lens of choice
creation, posits adaptive capacity in the discourse on transformation and panarchy
(Folke et al. 2010 ; Olsson et al. 2006 ; Walker et al. 2006 ; Schlüter and Herrfahrdt-
Pähle 2011 ) and recognises the importance of ongoing dialogues within the policy
sciences, such as path dependency, institutional inertia, and decision making under
uncertainty (Lempert et al. 2004 ; North 1990 ) .
Despite the growing body of evidence on adaptive capacity, governance and
management, there is still significant scope for scientific validation and evaluation
of many of the assumptions in the literature that has developed over the past decade,
particularly in cases that cross both spatial and temporal scales (Chapin et al. 2009 )
rather than looking at single institutions in isolation (Meinzen-Dick 2007 ) . Studies
should therefore move beyond just assessing adaptation strategies and plans, to
being able to investigating adaptive actions with a cross-scale lens. While a gover-
nance regime may not be a national plan or river basin plan for adaptation to climate
change, local water users may already have techniques for coping with uncertainty
that could provide valuable insights into the adaptive capacity of a particular sub-
basin or even river basin system.
The current status of research into adaptive capacity and building of adaptive
options is still in its infancy, despite an increase of interest in recent years (Engle
2011 ), and has only recently focussed more heavily on the practicalities of how to
adapt (Dovers and Hezri 2010 ). Previous assessments and studies have focused on
first showing that governance is important to adaptation and adaptive capacity, and
then identifying certain approaches that are important in a system for being adapt-
able to change. The relative paucity of deep empirical examples exploring adaptive
actions in periods that might be representative of a future warmer world remains a
challenge in the operationalisation and characterisation of adaptive capacity as well
as in the development in understanding how to mobilise it as climate change impacts
take hold. The methodology employed for this research and described in the next
chapter aims to address this gap, by drawing on the conceptualisation of adaptive
capacity that draws from the multiple approaches described within this chapter.
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