Tasty water of the good samaritan: collaborative governance and rural capacity enhancement for adapting water sources to climate change

Abstract

As the management of water resources becomes increasingly complex due to climatic stresses on socio-ecological systems, growing evidence suggests that collaborative governance with meaningful local participation is vital for building institutional adaptive capacity. Using a participatory institutional framework – Adaptive Co-Management – we assessed the nature and role of formal institutional collaboration in facilitating rural capacities to adapt water supply to climate change-related salinization. Findings include local perceptions of climate change occurrence, insufficient local adaptive responses, poor integration of external responses into local practices, and concurrent opportunities and constraints of institutional collaboration in capacity development. We concluded that framing adaptation strictly as a technical problem and restricting broad participation undercut embedded collective decision making processes in informal regimes, which provide accumulated institutional memory of intimate and detailed ecological knowledge relevant for adaptation. Also, collaboration between intermediary and local institutions needs strengthening.