assessment of the Rio Chama basin, a major upper tributary of the Rio Grande basin). 10. Nemec et al., supra note 6. 2014] NREL EDITION 31 competing uses of water under conditions of uncertainty and disturbance, particularly the effects of climate change like sustained or unprecedented drought. These conditions and disturbances pose threats to the flow regimes, aquatic habitats, and structural integrity of the basins as both ecosystems and important societal organizing units in western communities and economies. 12 However, other types of river basins also need adaptive water governance systems to enhance and sustain ecosystem and social-system resilience to climate change and other uncertainties and disturbance. These include smaller basins, Eastern basins, and basins influenced more by pollution, runoff (urban, suburban, and agricultural), and flooding than by scarcity and drought. 13 The Anacostia River Basin, which stretches from rural and suburban Maryland through the heavily urbanized District of Columbia, has all of these characteristics. When we started to analyze the resilience of the Anacostia River Basin, we initially used the Resilience Alliance's resilience assessment workbooks for scientists and practitioners. 14 However, our research soon revealed the strong role of institutions, which received too little systematic attention in the workbooks, and we shifted our methods of analysis to an institutional-historical analysis. Institutions are "the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions. .. at all scales." 15 Institutions are composed of rules, norms, and cultural-cognitive beliefs, all of which shape social action. 16 Institutions include law and legal regimes, formal governance systems and policies, and informal or decentralized systems of governance, including collaborative management of common resources, community norms, loose networks for collective action, and the like. 17 Institutions can be analyzed at macro levels of large-scale struc-11.