Natural Flood Management implementation is a wicked problem that involves difficult trade-offs, decisions by multiple stakeholders, and actions at multiple spatial scales. Governance of Natural Flood Management implementation is multi-level, with stakeholders connected through vertical, horizontal, and diagonal arrangements. We investigate the extent of multi-level governance of Natural Flood Management in two case studies in Scotland, United Kingdom to understand how decisions are currently made and how decisionmaking processes could be improved. We find that in vertical governance, national-level priorities dominate and constrain Local Authority and community decision-making. In horizontal governance, while there are many mechanisms for collaboration between Local Authorities such as the Local Flood Risk Management Plans, collaboration is in fact limited by funding and workload constraints. In diagonal governance, there are many ways to influence outcomes outside of traditional vertical and horizontal connections, especially through communities, Non-Governmental Organisations, and consulting firms. Improving cooperation and power-sharing across scales can lead to improved Natural Flood Management implementation and stronger resilience to flooding.
Climate change has become one of the biggest environmental challenges the world is currently facing. Recent IPCC projections indicate that climate change impacts will increase as current incremental-based adaptation management approaches are insufficient to deal with climate-induced systemic shocks and climate uncertainties. Despite the use of advanced climate impact assessment models, some uncertainty about the nature, scale and dynamics of these impacts on water systems remain persistent. Due to this uncertainty and the complexity of these systems, a shift to transformative water management, building on transformative adaptation, is needed to accommodate disruptive futures and transformative change. We cannot rely solely on predictive forward-looking approaches that generate likely futures, which argues in favor of the complementary use of normative approaches. Backcasting is such an approach that produces desirable futures, before looking back from these futures to the present in order to develop adaptation pathways that could lead to such desirable futures. Backcasting can provide directionality to transformative change, which can guide actions and small incremental, gradual steps towards transformative change, enabling to explore a diversity of possible adaptation pathways and pathway switching, but more effort is needed to further advance backcasting for transformative water management. Based on recent insights on both transformative adaptation and the use of backcasting for climate adaptation, this paper proposes nine principles for advancing backcasting for transformative water management.
This study investigates the practical merits and limitations of adaptive governance, an approach aimed at guiding the intricacies of climate adaptation in complex socio-technical ecological systems. Despite its recognition as a key strategy, questions persist regarding the potential of adaptive governance as a vehicle for meaningful adaptive change. To address this gap, this paper investigates the governance context of the water-adaptation process to drought and salinity in The Netherlands, with a focus on coastal agriculture in the northern Netherlands. Using an interpretative science approach, the study delves into the experiences and subjectivities of stakeholders engaged in adaptation initiatives combating water-related challenges through semi-structured and conversational interviews. The study presents an exploration of central adaptive governance elements (polycentricity; knowledge and learning; leadership; flexibility and variety; and communication) in theory and relates these to the reality of involved actors. The findings reveal how the aspired polycentric and flexible nature of adaptive governance negatively affects the other elements in practice by affecting collaboration and motivation for adaptation, and observes that (perceived) central leadership is much less influential than expected. The findings contribute to our understanding of the governance of lasting adaptivity, highlighting that the adaptive governance paradigm, although it remains useful, must be re-evaluated for contemporary use. Opportunities for the field are discussed.
Worldwide, deltas are important food-producing areas with increasingly densely populated cities. These water-rich areas are also vulnerable to natural, development and climate change-induced disasters such as floods, droughts, cyclones, sea-level rise and water pollution. Sustaining livelihoods of the delta population now and in the future, is therefore increasingly stressed and with compounding challenges: population growth, urbanization, degradation of the environment, dietary change, and climate change. An integrated approach is necessary to navigate this complexity and to move towards a sustainable but uncertain delta future. We introduce three methodological building blocks to facilitate governance in the delta towards sustainability: A food system approach, co-creation of transition pathways, and scale sensitive governance. We underpin the approach, describing the building blocks while referring to the articles in this Special Issue and other recent research using similar approaches. In this way, the article brings together insights on food systems transitions in deltas from different professional backgrounds and provides insight into and contributes to improving governance in water and food-stressed delta regions.
The Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) is the main agricultural production region in Vietnam producing rice, fruits, shrimps, livestock among a variety of crops. The current VMD agricultural production system (APS) is under threat from sea level rise aggravated by climate change causing further inland salinity intrusion. Transition pathways towards increased salinity adaptation in APSs are therefore required to maintain food security. This study assesses the present water sources usage for APSs and associated quality, quantity and food safety issues. Water-related stresses observed by farmers in the coastal Tra Vinh region are described based on a focus group discussion and in-depth household interviews. Multiple water sources were described for agricultural practices (e.g., surface water, deep well, rainwater) which differed per season. Also, farmers reported to be affected by salinity (67.3%) and groundwater shortages (28.8%) hampering current agricultural production. Solutions and adaptations foreseen vary from more efficient irrigation, dropping crops and new practices and in a lesser brackish water farming systems or moving to new places and transfer to new jobs. Subsequently, transition pathways focusing on salinity adaptation to maintain food security are proposed from a water- and soil management perspective and include i) irrigation innovations to produce crops under more scarce fresh water availability, ii) freshwater storage as a buffer in dry season; iii) basic water treatment options to make water brackish/saline water suitable for livestock and iv) increase soil organic content which can improve soil water retention and reduce impacts of salinity on crops. It is recommended to test multiple transition pathways on farm level in representative regions in the VMD through living labs or demonstration farms.
