1. Governing Water in Times of Climate (and Other) Changes

Water is a natural resource that like others has the potential to trigger conflicts over its availability and use; unlike others, however, it is also indispensable for human and other life. Current and future climate and socio-economic changes have and will have an impact on water and its management. In the past, the focus was put on the ‘good governance’ of water resources, and in particular on the derived framework of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). But traditional water governance, assuming the replication of stable conditions in the past, may not be able to address the challenges posed by climate and other changes to the allocation and regulation of water resources for different economic and human uses. Increasingly, scholars have focused on the adaptive and integrative nature of governance systems, which has led to an abundant body of research investigating the adaptive capacity of water regimes. While it is acknowledged that institutional adaptive capacity will enable to arrive at a governance system that integrates uncertainty, and copes with and responds to changes, it remains unclear how this process will unfold in practical cases. Introducing the aspiration of the present book to address such critical research question, this chapter recalls the historical importance of water for human populations, and how institutions have traditionally served to address the resource-related challenges of scarcity, allocation and use in the past. On these bases, it then makes the case for the need of achieving a better understanding of the processes and conditions that lead to institutional adaptive capacity in the water sector.