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Adaptive water governance scholarship aspires to flexible and responsive governance that is inclusive and supports learning and collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders. Much of this scholarship assumes that polycentric arrangements will facilitate these characteristics as different nodes of decision making adapt and respond to challenges within their arena of authority. However, in the case of both adaptive water governance and polycentricity, there are growing questions as to whether the reality matches the theoretical ideal. Drawing on a case study of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, we introduce the concept of a polycentric spectrum to distinguish between systems that resist change from those that enable more adaptive transformative change. In our case study, an overarching national agenda of water reform has generated a perpetual cycle of reviews and inquiries into water governance. We examined 34 reviews conducted since 2004, asking whether, how, and to what extent these recommendations are enabling governance adaptation and transformation versus maintaining conventional paradigms. Our analysis revealed problem-solving logics that have dominated water governance for decades to stymie efforts to move toward the more adaptive and transformative forms of governance required to address two key areas of reform: climate change and First Nations’ water justice. Despite an acknowledged need for substantive reforms, inquiry recommendations perpetuate technocratic (for climate change) or administrative rationalist (for First Nations) approaches. We argue that the reform agenda needs to be directed away from governments as the sole agents of change through deliberate and strategic efforts to engage local level and non-state actors who are central to adaptive water governance. This would require debate about reforms to move beyond how water is allocated and optimized to address how power is redistributed in the system. Our analysis questions whether polycentricity alone is sufficient to enable normatively desirable adaptive water governance, suggesting the need for future work to consider whether other organizing concepts, such as water justice might be required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adapting to climate change is a pressing societal imperative. Here, we examine water governance arrangements in Australia's Murray-Darling basin, evaluating their attributes and adequacy for fostering climate adaptation. We synthesize data from expert interviews and review water and climate policies, analyzing their framing, logic, and dominant discourses. Our analysis indicates that prescriptive top-down planning and administratively rational approaches constrain Australia's climate adaptation. Current governance regimes inhibit innovation due to dominant governance approaches that are centralist and managerial, reinforcing the status quo and privileging irrigation-based economies. In the Murray-Darling basin, reforms to policy settings and institutional arrangements are needed to mobilize industries and communities in exploring alternative water futures that support transformations. We offer two contrasting archetypes for climate-adaptive water policy based on foundationally different assumptions about what drives climate vulnerability and builds adaptive capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective adaptive governance will emerge from strong relationships between science, governance, and practice. However, these relationships receive scant critical attention among adaptive governance scholarship. To address this lacuna, Jasanoff's "idiom of coproduction" provides a lens to view the dialectical relationships between science and society. This view sees science and governance as coevolving through iterative relationships between the material, cognitive, social, and normative dimensions of a problem. This coevolution is precisely the aspiration of adaptive governance; however, the abstract notion of coproduction must be grounded to provide practical guidance for groups aspiring to "govern adaptively." I have drawn on three concepts, namely coproduction, bridging/ boundary organizations, and adaptive capacity, to present a conceptual framework of "coproductive capacities." Coproductive capacities are the material, cognitive, social, and normative capacities that enable groups of actors to connect knowledge with action in a cross-scale governance context. This framework was applied to two cases of connectivity conservation. Inspired by the science of conservation biology, connectivity conservation promotes collaborative, cross-scale governance to conserve biodiversity at a landscape scale. This tight coupling of science and governance in a cross-scale context makes connectivity conservation a classic case of both coproduction and adaptive governance. However, the inability of the initiatives in the cases examined to turn their visions into action highlights a critical absence of key capacities. In particular, challenges faced in connecting knowledge with action at various scales points to the importance of building relationships between actors across scales. The structures and mechanisms of governance have dominated adaptive governance scholarship, yet coproductive capacity and adaptive governance emerge from the relationships between actors seeking to connect knowledge with action. Building capacity to negotiate these relationships is a more fruitful focus for adaptive governance than design principles and diagnostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Griggs et al. (2013) redefine sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present while safeguarding Earth's life-support system, on which the welfare of current and future generations depend." We recommend this as the end goal that the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) should strive to achieve. Integration across the SDGs is less than what is required from a science perspective. Effective implementation of the SDGs will require States to attend to trade-offs and overlaps. We argue that continuous failure to address integration within the SDGs will jeopardize realization of this ultimate end goal. Therefore, we adopt a systems approach to identify gaps and connections across the goals and targets of the SDGs as well as leverage points for effective intervention. We triangulate across methods of critical analysis, conceptual modeling, and keyword network analysis to draw out seven "overarching directions" that could provide a prioritization framework to enhance efficient implementation of the SDGs. Our results identify main gaps as exclusion of key actors (e.g., corporations) and issues (e.g., intergenerational equity and population); inadequate reconciliation of economic growth with maintaining the Earth system; and deficient consideration of the relationship with international law. Conceptual mapping identifies education and innovation; governance and implementation; sustainable consumption and production; and addressing the key drivers of climate change as key leverage points. The keyword analysis highlights greater integration within the SDGs than what appears at face value. Keywords "access," "women," "resources," and "finance" feature across the SDGs and provide further leverage points. Targeting these issues will facilitate realization of a high proportion of SDGs and correspondingly could have a disproportional impact on effective SDG implementation. We conclude that the success of the SDGs needs to be evaluated by the extent to which it contributes to human development while advancing protection of "planetary must-haves" for current and future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The water-energy-food nexus concept is criticized as not yet fit for deeply integrated and contested governance agendas. One problem is how to achieve equitable risk governance and management where there is low consensus on priorities, poor inclusion and coordination of risk assessment procedures, and a weak emphasis placed on cross-scale and sectoral interactions over time. Participatory system dynamics modeling processes and analyses are promising approaches for such challenges but are currently underutilized in nexus research and policy. This paper shares our experience implementing one such analysis in the Mekong river basin, a paradigmatic example for international nexus research. Our transdisciplinary research design combined participatory causal loop diagramming processes, scenario modeling, and a new resilience analysis method to identify and test anticipated water-energy-food risks in Kratie and Stung Treng provinces in northeastern Cambodia. Our process generated new understanding of potential crosssectoral and cross-level risks from major hydropower development in the region. The results showed expected trade-offs between national level infrastructure programs and local level food security, but also some new insights into the effects local population increases may have on local food production and consumption even before hydropower developments are built. The analysis shows the benefit of evaluating risks in the nexus at different system levels and over time because of how system dynamics and inflection points are taken into account. Additionally, our case illustrates the contribution participatory system-thinking processes can make to risk assessment procedures for complex systems transitions. We originally anticipated that any new capacity reported by partners and participants would come from our modeling results produced at the end of the process. However, participants in the modeling procedures also found the experience powerful the information sharing, rapid risk assessment, and personal learning it enabled. A lesson from our experience reinforces a message from the transdisciplinary research field that has not yet been absorbed into the nexus research and policy field wholeheartedly: we do not have to wait for perfect data and incontestable results before making a positive contribution to anticipating and responding to risks that emerge from nexus relations if we apply participatory and systems-thinking informed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]