Abstract
Different challenges arising from increasingly uncertain and unpredictable hydro-climatic conditions have been accompanied by a shifting focus of water governance solutions. More recently, the water resources research community has paid increasingly close attention to climate change adaptation and adaptive processes in relation to water governance, recognizing the need to better understand adaptive processes that seek to embrace, rather than control uncertainty. This chapter presents these issues and introduces the linked concepts of adaptive capacity, adaptive governance and resilience in social ecological systems. It provides a review of how these topics approach the challenges presented in previous chapters, and how scholars have sought to develop these frameworks to better take into account the need to foster and mobilise adaptive capacity within water governance structures.
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Notes
- 1.
Adaptive capacity has been analyzed in various ways, including via thresholds and “‘coping ranges’”, defined by the conditions that a system can deal with, accommodate, adapt to, and recover from (de Loe and Kreutzwiser, 2000; Jones, 2001; Smit et al. 2000; Smit and Pilifosova, 2001, 2003). Most communities and sectors can cope with (or adapt to) normal climatic conditions and moderate deviations from the norm, but exposures involving extreme events that may lie outside the coping range, or may exceed the adaptive capacity of the community (Smit and Wandel 2006, p 287).
- 2.
Also refer to Downing et al. (1997) and Pittock and Jones (2000).
- 3.
See Watts and Bohle (1993) and Vogel (1998).
- 4.
An enabling legislative and policy environment that sets up and empowers; an appropriate institutional framework composed of a mixture of central, local, river-basin-specific, and public–private organisations that provides the governance arrangements for administering; and a set of management instruments for gathering data and information, assessing resource levels and needs, and allocating resources for use.
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Hill, M. (2013). Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Governance and Resilience. In: Climate Change and Water Governance. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5796-7_3
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