Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Murtinho, Felipe

Titel

Adaptation to Environmental Change among Water User Associations in the Colombian Andes

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In developing countries, understanding how communities organize and cooperate is particularly important for water management as many rural communities must decide by themselves if and how they will protect their watersheds and distribute their water. Despite research on the factors that facilitate collective action in resource management, we have limited knowledge on the specific conditions that enable local communities to adapt to changing conditions. This doctoral dissertation explores the factors that determine whether local Water User Associations in the Fúquene watershed in the Andes of Colombia take measures to adapt to threats to their water availability. The study uses a hybrid agency-structure theoretical approach including concepts from the New Institutional Economics literature in order to answer four research questions: i) what threats to water availability, if any, do WUAs face in Fúquene?, ii) what adaptation strategies are WUAs implementing, if any, in response to these threats?, iii) what conditions facilitate (or impede) WUAs' initiatives to adapt to these threats? And as a specific subset of the above question, iv) what are the impacts of different financial strategies on WUAs' initiatives to adapt? The research uses quantitative and qualitative methods incorporating data from surveys of water user associations and households, meteorological data, municipal socio-economic information and land-use maps. The results show how and why different characteristics at three different scales (the household, the association, and the broader governing context) impact the decision of the associations to adapt to changes in water conditions. The study shows that the key factors that facilitate WUAs' initiatives to adapt include: households willingness to support their WUAs, water scarcity perceptions (more than actual environmental changes), WUAs' self-organization capacity and collective management experience, and the local government financial support to WUAs (but only when support is requested by the WUA). The findings of this study contributes to geography and other disciplines that study human-environment relations and decision-making in three ways: i) explicitly linking natural disturbances to adaptation strategies, ii) understanding collective resource management under varied and changing conditions, and iii) exploring the impacts of decision-making and coupled human-environment conditions at different scales on collective action and adaptation.