Delegating state responsibilities for the management of water resources to regional bodies and the provision of drinking water and sanitation to local governments has led to new configurations in urban water governance. Drawing on case studies from four cities in the global South (Guarulhos, Arequipa, Lima and Durban), this article analyzes recent changes in these configurations, with particular attention to the role and power of the municipality in this process. This paper explores to what extent these new configurations reveal a move towards resilience, transition or even transformation. It concludes that there are clear indications of transition in all cases, and in Guarulhos and Durban even some signs of transformation. Given that transformative changes in the legal and institutional framework, and even in values and attitudes, have not yet affected the existing power structures, the question is to what extent these signs of transformation will reach their full potential.

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This chapter discusses both citizen and stakeholder participation as an instrument in urban governance. Citizens and other non-state actors can be involved in local decision-making in many different ways. Privatization of previously public entities such as municipal water companies, port authorities or educational institutes has created new local actors, adding new challenges to urban governance. Communication technologies both facilitate and complicate interaction between actors in the governance process. Where governance outcomes are contested, ordinary citizens increasingly take recourse to legal action or mobilise on 'the streets' to hold their governments to account. This chapter discusses these general trends while highlighting how issues of scale and local context shape participatory practices locally.

Recently, three processes were used to analyze the consequences of plausible climate change scenarios for urban water governance in Lima. The first process, led by a German-financed research team, developed climate change scenarios using innovative tools. The second, Chance2Sustain, brought spatial perspectives to urban development and water governance, mapping spatial inequities in water-related vulnerabilities and including community-based knowledge. The Metropolitan Municipality of Lima (MML) initiated the third process, to prepare a city development and Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. This paper examines how these processes of knowledge construction contributed to transitions in water governance and climate change adaptation strategies. Although all processes used concertación (1) in their knowledge construction, the actors and the incorporated knowledge differed considerably. While the first example was dominated by professional groups and technical-professional knowledge, the Chance2Sustain and city processes included a wider range of actors and shifted thinking about adaptive management towards including contextualembedded knowledge.

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