The massive engineering of the rivers and wetlands of North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has controlled these water resources to foster economic development. While society has received many benefits from this development and the wealth generated enhances social adaptive capacity, the engineered changes have come at the expense of ecosystem resilience. Engineered changes in the path and timing of river flow and optimization for a narrow range of services have led to declines in ecosystem services, such as biodiversity, floodplain storage, and water purification. These changes have also narrowed the space for adaptation to climate change and reduced the options for reconciliation of development with ecosystem services. Governance lies at the heart of the capacity of these systems to navigate accelerating change and manage resilience. The Adaptive Water Governance project used resilience assessment of North American water basins to understand the capacity of these social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in a manner that reconciles development with ecosystem services as they undergo climate change.
Results/Conclusions
In parallel with broad governance trends in western democracies, North American water basins reveal the seeds of adaptive governance that includes greater public participation, networks across sectors and jurisdictions to allow response at the problem scale, and a process of incremental implementation, learning, and adjustment. The studies also indicate that despite the self-organizing nature, government remains and must remain an integral part of this adaptive governance and adjustments in the law providing the authority, structure and process of government may help in accelerating adaptation. The use of existing flexibility in the law and the development of new legal tools are necessary to trigger, facilitate, and institutionalize the results of adaptive and transformative governance and to ensure that greater involvement of private actors and increased flexibility do not come at the expense of legitimacy, transparency, accountability, equity and justice.