PhD Graduation

The focal question of this thesis is: how to adapt to climate related risks in managed river basins? Adaptation has gained attention as an inevitable response to the challenges posed by climate change. The increasingly uncertain climatic conditions to which actors are exposed, are becoming a constraint for their well-being. From the start, I was fascinated by the potential merits of a particular adaptation strategy: diversification. Here I interpreted diversification as the combination of different land-use and water management activities within a region. I then conceptualised and assessed adaptation as the process of actors developing and implementing strategies to reach adaptation objectives. Thus, the main objective of my thesis was to study diversification as a strategy of actors to adapt to climate related risk.

Borrowing from economic theory, I assessed how combining land-use and water management activities influences their expected revenue and risk. I found that, to make full use of the potential of such combinations of activities to reduce climate related risks, the performance of water and land-use management activities had to be studied over the total range of climatic conditions and across different spatial scales. This is different from the current practice where water management activities are typically tailored to perform under a specific design discharge or narrow range of extreme events. Although diversification of land-use and water management could be shown to be a promising adaptation strategy to cope with climate risks, it is not yet extensively planned for and turns out to be difficult to implement. Therefore, my work also examined constraints and opportunities for implementing water and land-use diversification.

Two complementary frameworks that I found to be particularly useful in understanding these barriers and opportunities, were i) a recent conceptualisation of governance in terms of key governance principles and challenges (such as credibility, stability, inclusiveness, adaptiveness, legitimacy and allocation), and ii) transition literature that approaches major policy change from the perspective of individual actors and their strategies.

I learned that water and land-use diversification is enhanced by pilot projects that test and debate new ideas through collaboration between recognised actors from civil society, policy and science. A challenge for the newly emergent coalitions of state actors and non-state actors is to move towards legitimate, accountable and adaptive governance. Another challenge is keeping the momentum after a coalition has formed around a new idea, given fragmentation of objectives, dynamics and path dependency. At present only few strategies have been analysed or tested that support a diverse set of potentially better-adapted activities rather than compensate for climate impacts on existing activities. Typical advice includes encouraging innovation through a rich variety of experiments and transition approaches that probe possible directions. Thus the currently fragmented implementation of agriculture, nature and water policies and projects could be turned into an advantage by recognising different regionally negotiated solutions as a set of experiments, from which actors can learn.

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Leemans

Co-promotor: Prof.dr. P. Kabat