Local service providers in cities around the world face both acute and chronic pressures to which they will need to adapt in order to continue to provide reliable public services. For water utilities, these pressures may include climatic shifts, demographic changes, infrastructure failures, water quality degradation and supply chain disruptions, among others. How water utilities choose between various adaptation actions available to them is not well understood; however, their adaptations decisions can influence their exposure to future risks and their long-term adaptation strategies.
To investigate what influences water utility adaptation, we conducted focus groups with local drinking water utilities in the U.S. We identify five types of institutional dependencies arising from the polycentric institutional environment and present a conceptual model that demonstrates how these dependencies constrain the choice of adaptation pathways for water utilities, for instance, by impacting the feasibility of or transaction costs associated with adaptation actions. Our results suggest that water utilities lack full autonomy over decisions that impact their ability to adapt to change.
A thoughtful management of common-pool resources has gained increasing political and societal importance due to climate change. National, federal and regional policy strategies ought to enhance collective action and propose pathways for effective management of CPR, guiding the diverse actors involved. While there is consensus on the need for institutional change to address climate change impacts especially on water resources, policy documents can vary in how they coordinate actors and improve management structures.
One management approach that has gained interest in water management is adaptive water management, which emphasizes flexibility and the ability to adjust practices based on changing conditions and new information. This method incorporates structured learning into an iterative cycle of planning, implementing, monitoring, adjusting, and evaluating. Despite its recognition as a viable solution for resource management, its integration into policy strategies remains unclear. This paper adopts an institutional perspective on water management, examining whether and which principles of adaptive management are reflected in current German water management policies.
The study deconstructs water management structures and institutions to a) provide a catalogue of adaptive management principles and b) assesses the role of German policy documents in guiding adaptive management practices. It combines semi-structured expert interviews with qualitative document analysis, focusing on strategies from several administrative levels addressing water management from a broad perspective, or focusing on groundwater and drinking water supply in particular.
While these documents provide limited practical guidance for translating foundational ideas into daily practice, some strategies support adaptive water management by incorporating flexibility, learning, and monitoring into their vision of collective action. In contrast, other strategies hinder adaptive management by adhering to rigid and linear management processes. The paper concludes with recommendations for how to integrate adaptive management principles into policy design to strengthen the adaptive capacity of water management systems.
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