How to Deal with Climate Change?

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.

Far from being pioneering in terms of trying and understanding how water and human beings and societies interconnect, this work starts by presenting an overview of the previous literature that exists in this domain. The analysis, first, draws on the academic debate that portrays water-related problems and scarcities as the result of mismanagement and ineffective policy decisions. Thus, we look in detail at the new paradigms of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and Adaptive and Integrated Water Resources Management (AIWM). Turning to political science and International Relations (IR) theories, this chapter then equips the reader with a thorough definition and understanding of governance (vertical and horizontal governance, multi-level governance, water governance, and adaptive governance) and institutions (their concept, institutional change, institutions across scales and institutional adaptive capacity). We find there have been relatively few empirical studies on how institutions and governance mechanisms systematically build – or not – their adaptive capacity to respond to the expected impacts of climate change in the water sector. We attempt to move the analysis of institutional adaptation mechanisms away from a mere focus on organisational learning towards looking at the interactions and development process of institutions. Finally, and given the inherent multi-scale nature of water resources management, the perspective of those scholars focusing on how governance stretches across spatial and temporal levels is presented. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need to establish and reinforce institutional adaptive capacity to facilitate system transformation towards the integration of uncertainty and the consequent ability to respond to change. However, from the literature it remains unclear how this process does or should occur, thus highlighting the need for a dynamic multi-level analysis of water institutions and how they respond to change.

The following chapter presents the conceptual and methodological approach of this study, both relying on the theoretical foundations of vertical and horizontal governance, institutions and adaptive management of water resources. In that, we enrich multi-level governance with insights from institutionalism, to untangle its dynamics; and from adaptive capacity, to derive a typology for water governance frameworks. In this chapter, we present the challenges posed by identifying the determinants of institutional adaptive capacity across governance scales. To this end, we combine theory and data-driven approaches to arrive at own determinants and categories in an iterative fashion. We thus distil a final set of five categories of hypothesised determinants: (a) government and governance; (b) infrastructure; (c) information management; (d) human and social resources; and (e) finances and risk. Based on the prevalence of determinants of adaptive capacity and their interactions across scales, a typology of four different governance frameworks is proposed: resistant, reactive-incremental, proactive-incremental and adaptive. We show how the different adaptation strategies and measures allow identifying the type of framework in place by using semi-structured expert interviews from across a representative sample of formal and informal institutions dealing with water resources management in the case studies of the Po River Basin in Italy and the Syr Darya River Basin in the Kyrgyz Republic.

This chapter presents in detail the case of the Po River basin. It starts by outlining its geographical and socio-economic characteristics, including how water is used for different economic purposes by relevant economic sectors, and when and why it gives rise to situations of conflict. As a second step, the main factors that determine and explain the vulnerability of the Po River basin are introduced, as well as its sensitivity and exposure to climate change. The chapter further describes the governance framework for water resources management in place, including actors, roles, policies and conflicts. We complement this overview on the institutional arrangements by looking at how climate change and disaster risk management are currently governed, and thus how the expected pressures could be dealt with. We identify the water governance system in Italy in general, and the Po River Basin in particular, being strongly fragmented and complex, with many institutions at different levels responsible for similar tasks related to water use, disaster risk management and environmental protection, without a distinctive mandate to address climate change through the implementation of appropriate adaptation measures. Analysing the interview data for the Po River basin, we find that the political dimension received greatest attention, immediately followed by the management of human, social and water resources, and information sharing, communication and awareness raising. In turn, financing adaptive capacity and infrastructure were emphasised least, indicating that in the Po River basin, water resources management seems to be strongly dependent upon (and influenced by) political factors, including all the organisational and administrative aspects that enable and guide decision and policy-making.

The second case presented in this book is the Syr Darya River basin, a transboundary watershed feeding with its glacier-melt waters most of the Central Asia region. In the first part, this chapter introduces the main geographical and socio-economic characteristics of the Syr Darya River basin as well as of the country where it originates and flows: Kyrgyzstan. Subsequently, the analysis shifts towards considering water resources management within the broader regional context of Central Asia. There, in fact, transboundary waters have been the very protagonists of diplomatic and political relations between the five Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all since their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. As a consequence, their water governance systems are strongly interrelated, and can in no way be considered in isolation from one another. In the second part of this chapter, the key factors that determine and explain the vulnerability of the Syr Darya River basin, and of Kyrgyzstan more specifically, to the impacts of climate change are outlined, and a first analysis of the adaptive capacity of its institutional framework, based on the results of expert interviews, is presented. We find that, influenced by international actors, a decentralisation approach was adopted after independence in the Kyrgyz water sector, with increased roles and responsibilities being delegated at subnational levels. Nevertheless, the institutional and policy framework for water resources management remained fragmented and poorly implemented. Climate change adaptation is not yet on the political agenda and mostly occurs in an ad-hoc manner with stimulus from international donors and agencies. In addition, it is suggested that water resources management in the region is strongly dependent on social and political factors, rather than on more technical concerns such as information sharing or infrastructure.

The following chapter presents, interprets and compares the findings from the Po River basin in Italy and the Syr Darya River basin in Kyrgyzstan with respect to the capacity of institutions in the water sector to address the prospected impacts of climatic and socio-economic changes. The analysis suggests that for the Po River basin, the political willingness to mobilise and translate adaptation into concrete responses and longer-term action plans is missing. In Kyrgyzstan, the conditions for adaptation are not established, thus requiring substantial efforts to build adaptive capacity of institutions in the water sector by activating all the considered aspects, i.e. infrastructure, information, finances, human and social capital, and political willingness and structure. The second part of this chapter compares the two water governance systems under review in terms of how the multi-level dimension played out in shaping the relationships and defining the impacts of the hypothesised determinants of adaptive capacity. Our analysis importantly highlights the relevance of international institutions in advancing concerns about adaptive capacity in the case of Kyrgyzstan, and of domestic regional institutions in the case of the Po River basin. Finally, we suggest some policy-relevant adaptation measures to include consistent data collection and dissemination, cross-sectoral collaboration, promotion of domestic political responsibility and initiative, awareness-raising of climate change impacts among key stakeholders, and a regional strategy.

In this concluding chapter, we elaborate on the contributions of our study in terms of (i) understanding the multi-level dimension of water governance arrangements, and (ii) illustrating the interconnectedness of scales for assessing drivers and barriers of institutional adaptive capacities. We show that the multi-level dimension is crucial to define whether and how much a given governance arrangement in the water sector will be adaptive to respond to climate-related and socio-economic changes. Therefore, governance processes should address issues of fit and scale, particularly in light of uncertainty and unprecedented change. With respect to the interconnectedness, our finding is that determinants of adaptive capacity act in complex combination across scales to produce certain adaptive outcomes. In the second part of this chapter, we make use of the lessons learned from our study to suggest a number of policy recommendations. On the overall, for a political framework to be adaptive, we see the need for an integrated and coordinated approach, shaped around the river basin as the natural unit of reference within a national adaptation strategy formulated by the central state. In turn, the conceptualisation and implementation of such a strategy need to occur at interconnected vertical and horizontal governance scales, and by institutionalising participatory processes at the river basin level.