Adaptive capacity, drought and the performance of community-based drinking water organizations in Costa Rica

Abstract

Community-based drinking water organizations (CBDWOs) are the most important providers of water in rural areas of the developing world. They are responsible for coping with future threats due to climate change, besides other non-climatic drivers of change such as demographic growth. The inherent capacities of CBDWOs to adapt to external drivers of change would be greatly conditioned by their capacities to initiate and catalyze collective processes. The rich background of CDBWOs' actual and historical responses to drought phenomena is an essential starting point for understanding both the processes and the limitations of adapting to future adverse climatic events. In this study, we contrast six CBDWOs located in the Costa Rican dry corridor, in order to analyze their ability to self-organize coping with recent annual periodical droughts. We found that CBDWOs implement hard, soft, and ecosystem-based adaptation measures. The decisions in this regard are reactive, tend to follow a sequential order, and are context dependent. One of the main factors that facilitates capital-intensive adaptation measures is the ability of CBDWOs to mobilize internal or external financial resources, which further depends on social capital and the governance structure.

How community engagement in water and sanitation interventions impacts human health, infrastructure and service longevity in low- and middle-income countries: a realist review

“…Failure of interventions can occur for several reasons, such as lack of community involvement in design (15,16), lack of ownership (17,18), abuse of funds or poor financial management, lack of willingness of community members to contribute (18)(19)(20), lack of communication and connectedness (21) and no ongoing support and acknowledgement of change (22)(23)(24). In addition to an increased understanding of success and failures in WASH interventions, there is a growing trend to use community participation to drive health programmes, based on the expectation working with communities can help ensure interventions are more relevant to local priorities (25).…”

What facilitates adaptation? An analysis of community-based adaptation to environmental change in the Andes

“…Because there was no WUA initiative or involvement in implementation of unsolicited help, donations or gifts were not categorized as adaptation strategies. Similar to previous research (Kundzewicz et al 2007;Noble et al 2014;Madrigal-Ballestero and Naranjo 2015), the adaptation strategies that WUAs are implementing in Fúquene are classified in three categories: i) micro-watershed management, ii) supply water management, and iii) demand water management. Figure 3 also distinguishes strategies financed with WUAs' internal resources and those that received external financial support from local governments (see Murtinho 2013 for a description of these adaptation strategies).…”

“…Given that community-based adaptation is rooted in the ability of households to cooperate, specifically in the case of common-pool resources such as water, this study draws from the socio-ecological system (SES) framework (McGinnis and Ostrom 2014) to explore the factors that facilitate communal decision-making to adapt (Madrigal-Ballestero and Naranjo 2015). The SES framework provides a useful way of identifying potential variables, and can be organized in five broad categories including (1) social, economic and political settings; (2) resource systems and units; (3) governance systems; (4) actors; and (5) interactions and outcomes.…”

“…The SES framework provides a useful way of identifying potential variables, and can be organized in five broad categories including (1) social, economic and political settings; (2) resource systems and units; (3) governance systems; (4) actors; and (5) interactions and outcomes. Following previous studies, not all categories and subcategories of the SES framework are included in the analysis (some factors do not have appreciable variation among cases or they are not relevant to the research question) (Basurto and Ostrom 2009;Madrigal-Ballestero and Naranjo 2015).…”

“…As this study shows, in rural areas of the Fúquene watershed, located in the eastern Andes of Colombia, WUAs are adapting to increasing water scarcity due to land cover changes and rainfall variability (Murtinho et al 2013a). Similar to other watersheds in Latin America (De Bievre et al 2012;Madrigal-Ballestero and Naranjo 2015;UNDP 2015), WUAs in Fúquene are implementing adaptation strategies such as purchasing land to conduct ecosystem restoration in order to improve water regulation, building additional water tanks to increase water storage, and reducing water demand by increasing prices and installing metering devices in each household (Murtinho et al 2013b). The following section of this article, then presents the theoretical background on the factors that facilitate adaptation.…”