Applying a Multi-pronged Approach to Assessing Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 72

• Better understand how the governance context and elements within those frame-

works contribute to an enabling environment for adaptive capacity;
Better understand the challenges in generating adaptive capacity across temporal •

and spatial scales.

Since this research took place within the context of the EU FP7 ACQWA project,
there were certain parameters within which the research needed to take place, and a
certain set of deliverables that needed to be met. Primarily, the case regions for the
project were already defined as being the Rhône Basin, the Po Basin and the
Aconcagua Basin, as well as a set of secondary case areas in Argentina and
Kyrgyzstan that would inform the main cases. Additionally, as part of the main
work package deliverables, a governance assessment in the context of IWRM was
to be completed as a preliminary task for the research. This chapter on methodology
will focus more heavily on the primary research on adaptive capacity across the
disparate cases of the Chilean and Swiss basins, but will also detail the methods
employed to complete the governance assessment (presented in Chaps. 7 and 8 ) , as
it was a piece of research that served to inform the findings, despite it not being a
core part of the analytical framework developed for this research.
As detailed above, the case study selection was in part pre-defined by the param-
eters of the ACQWA project. While the case selection was driven primarily from the
physical science context (in particular the fact that the Chilean region is facing
today what might be the climate and glacio-nival environments of tomorrow in the
Alps), as contrasting mountain zones with varying levels of climate data across
which developments in hydrological and climatological models could be developed
and transferred, the case areas also present a valuable opportunity for comparative
analysis across highly contrasting governance contexts. Chapter 4 provides a deeper
explanation of the case areas, which represent mountain watershed glacio-nival
regimes where climate impacts on water resources (glaciers, snow pack, precipitation)
have already been documented (Beniston et al. 2011 ; Pellicciotti et al. 2007 ) . As the
frame of analysis is interested in understanding multi-scalar process adaptive
processes, the broad unit of analysis is river basin management (including a cross
section of different uses across different scales), within which a set of sub-case
areas were identified (see Chap. 6 ) .
Research was divided into two complementary stages; an initial governance
assessment and the main adaptive capacity assessment (Fig. 5.2 ). This section shall
briefly detail the governance assessment methodology, but focus more heavily on
the core methodological and analytical structure of the adaptive capacity elements
that was the focus of the research. The governance assessment analysed the gover-
nance framework according to indicators of accountability, transparency and par-
ticipation, within the wider context of IWRM. The next step aimed to more
comprehensively address the adaptability of the governance system, by taking the
impacts of climate change more specifically into account.
A set of extreme events were therefore identified within each case area to further
test and refine a wider set of indicators in the context of past extreme events, such
as drought and flooding events. These events served as a context in which to explore