Unpacking Resilience for Adaptation: Incorporating Practitioners’ Experiences through a Transdisciplinary Approach to the Case of Drought in Chile

Abstract

Current debate on the implementation of resilience in addressing climatic impacts calls for more pragmatic means of reducing losses. In this study we aimed to generate context-specific knowledge about resilience factors for addressing the impacts of drought, with the expectation that bringing forth experiential knowledge on how impacts were addressed in the past would shed light on what constitutes key resilience factors for practitioners working in urban contexts. The study was carried in three of the largest cities in Chile: Santiago, Concepción, and Valdivia. The analytical framework consists of urban and regional resilience incorporating transdisciplinary approaches applying the Resilience-Wheel tool, combined with participatory methods for the co-production of knowledge and qualitative content analysis of documents and workshops. Results show that key determinants of building resilience to drought were: improving education and access to information, enhancing preparedness, promoting technology transfer, reinforcing organizational linkages and collaboration, decentralizing governance, and encouraging citizen participation. The Resilience-Wheel was useful for navigating the conceptual complexity and diversity of perspectives inherent among social actors. The transdisciplinary approach allowed us to co-produce key knowledge that can be applied to build resilience in future, through a bottom-up approach that bridges the science-policy interface.

The 2010–2015 megadrought in central Chile: impacts on regional hydroclimate and vegetation

“…For instance, the year 2013 was the driest during the MD but has a low number of decrees and agriculture emergencies. Coincidently, another survey study by Aldunce et al (2016) indicates that water shortage decrees are the worst evaluated drought relief measure by the rural population. During a drought, county officials can also ask for financial resources from the central government in order to pay for potable water delivery by trucks to rural communities.…”

“…Recent studies suggest that the MD was perceived by most of the population, but the impacts in rural areas were more direct and more detrimental than in urban settings (Aldunce et al, 2016(Aldunce et al, , 2017. A cursory analysis of the responses given by the state, the private sector and civil society indicate that most of them are based on the assumption that the megadrought is a transient event and weakly related to the actual rainfall deficit in a given region or period.…”

Assessment of Resilience of Pistachio Agroecosystems in Rafsanjan Plain in Iran

“…Recognizing the influence of both internal and external regulation on the resilience of PPSs, we suggest a participatory platform [52] to bring together different stakeholders to identify solutions to their problems [53] regarding both regulatory sources and sustaining resilience as common goals. For example, the platform can contribute to forming a grass roots organization, which facilitates sharing of experiences, the risk of disaster and resources, particularly water resources, and drive the best management practices.…”

Water Privatization and Inequality: Gini Coefficient for Water Resources in Chile

“…This occurs in the Chilean case, which takes on greater relevance in the face of resistance from democratic authorities for recognizing the importance of adapting the regulation of the water domain to current times. On January 7, 2020, the Senate of the Republic has decided to reject the consecration of water as a national good of public use [4], despite the fact that Chile faces a severe drought [5] and that international literature raises the urgency of rethinking the models of governance over natural resources [6]. This article presents evidence on how the Chilean case can illustrate the complexity of creating a market through the privatization of water rights for consumptive purposes, which leads to a high concentration of ownership of a good without substitutes, generating speculative scenarios with the commercialization of property and significant inequality in access to water.…”