Climate Change Vulnerability, Adaptation and Adaptive Governance in Mendoza, Argentina

PAULA MUSSETTA Y FACUNDO MARTIN

San Rafael

Workshop; IAI CRN-CRA2047 Final Meeting; 2014

IANIGLA - CONICET

The research address the understanding of the vulnerability and adaptive strategies of Mendoza´s basin rural communities to shifts in climate variability and to the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events. Vulnerability creates adaptation challenges not only for farmers but also for institutions involved with climate, water, agricultural and land management issues. For this, our research is also concerned with adaptive governance: that governance that spans a range of political, social, economic and administrative system and develops, manage and distribute a resource in a manner that promotes resilience through collaborative, flexible and learning based issue management across different scales. Adaptive policies should promote resilience and adaptation in order to reduce vulnerability. And they are supposed to be transformative in order to not reproduce vulnerability. Adaptation to global change is not a lineal process: neither institutions, nor communities will adapt guided exclusively by the warning of the risk made by scientific approaches, regardless of their "cientificity", legitimacy or truthfulness. Neither adaptation will result only from technology transferences or funding measures. On the contrary, the type and rhythm of response of each community or institution will depend on a number of devices and specific constraints that are the typical kind of explanations that social sciences provide. In this way, the science-policy dialogue enables us to diagnoses adaptive capacities and promotes future adaptation responses to be adopted for achieving water security.