Archetypical barriers to adapting water governance in river basins to climate change

Abstract

Can we explain barriers to adaptation of collective action to changes in the natural environment? One reason for adaptation is the impacts of climate change. Ample case study evidence shows that such adaptation is rarely a smooth process. However, generalisable patterns of how and why barriers arise remain scarce. The study adopts a collective action perspective and the archetypes approach in a meta-analysis of 26 selected publications to explain how barriers arise in specific conditions. Focusing on adaptation of water governance in river basins, the study finds 21 reappearing patterns. Less well-established patterns relate to water property rights, hydrological standards, adaptation externalities, non-climatological uncertainty and vertical coordination. Results further show how barriers impede collective action in specific ways. The paper precisely introduces the archetypes approach, and shows that reported problems in adapting collective action under climate change arise from attributes of actors and pre-existing institutions rather than biophysical characteristics.

Introduction to the special issue on adapting institutions to climate change

“…Further advancements, though, will require a characterization of the different social dilemmas linked with climate adaptation. Villamayor-Tomas (2017) and Oberlack and Eisenack (2017) are already moving a few steps in that direction, following the direction shown by Bisaro and Hinkel (2016).…”

“…Most importantly, though, the analysis shows that specific combinations of physical characteristics of the disturbance at stake lead to different collective responses. Oberlack and Eisenack (2017) raise the question of how barriers to adaptation arise, and address it through a collective action perspective. Focusing on "archetypes" of barriers in collective action processes, they search for evidence of mechanisms causing resistance to change and suboptimal arrangements to persist.…”

Mapping social-ecological systems archetypes

“…Our work extends previous efforts for mapping SES [27-32, 38, 39, 45] in that it considers a broader range of both social and ecological variables outlined by Ostrom. Our work contributes, to our knowledge, one of the few attempts to upscale Ostrom's framework to a multinational scale that matches the scale of the resource flow dynamics: the basin (see [46]). The unit of analysis was second-level administrative units (N=99 in the Volta basin) that clustered into six SES archetypes.…”

“…Previous efforts have relied heavily in qualitative data, which restricts the analysis to smaller sample sizes (i.e. see work by [45], N=12; or [46], N=26). While our approach looses some of the richness provided by case studies, it allows us to take advantage of data over a larger spatial scale and few observations across time to draw comparisons among diverse places.…”

Sustainable rural renewal in China: archetypical patterns

“…A major goal of studies investigating sustainable rural renewal in China is to explicitly portray this interplay among the attributes and extract the underlying patterns based on substantial cases. Fortunately, a series of studies exploring other resources and environmental https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss3/art32/ topics have already addressed a similar concern by using an archetype analysis (Oberlack and Eisenack 2014, Oberlack et al 2016, Oberlack and Eisenack 2018. Archetypes are recurrent patterns of basic interplay in SES (Oberlack et al 2019), and they function as building blocks of social-ecological interplay that recur in multiple cases.…”