In the Andean region of South America, understanding how communities organize and cooperate is particularly important for water management as many rural communities receive minimal government support and the communities themselves must decide if and how they will protect their watersheds and distribute their water. Despite research on the factors that facilitate collective action in resource management, there is limited knowledge on the specific conditions that enable local communities to adapt to uncertain changing conditions such as land-use changes and climate change.
Ph.D. student Felipe Murtinho under the supervision of his doctoral advisor Dr. David Carr at the University of California Santa Barbara will explore the factors that determine whether local water user associations in the Fúquene watershed in Colombia take measures to manage their micro-watershed in order to adapt to the degradation of their water resources. Fúquene is an ideal place to examine how local communities adapt to water degradation because in most communities access to safe drinking water depends on the management decisions of the user associations. In addition, this region faces uncertain water conditions due to land-use changes and climate variability. Specifically, this research will address the two following questions: what conditions either facilitate or impede a water user associations' initiatives to adapt to changing micro-watershed conditions?, and if a water use association undertakes an initiative, what specifically do they do, and why do they choose certain adaptation strategies over others? The proposed research uses quantitative and qualitative methods including in-depth interviews to key informants and multi-level statistical models with information from water user associations and households? surveys, meteorological data, municipal socio-economic information and land-use/land cover maps. The project results will provide explanations about how and why different characteristics at three different scales (households, the associations, and the broader governing context) impact the decision of the associations to adapt to changes in water conditions.
This study explores resource management and collective action when local communities face environmental changes. The results will contribute to the literature on adaptation to environmental change by identifying key factors that determine how, and under what conditions water user associations adapt to changes in water sources degradation. The research focuses particularly on identifying at what scale adaptation processes are triggered: do adaptation initiatives depend on households/associations characteristics? Or, is support from local governmental agencies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) a determining factor in associations' decisions to adapt? Answers to these questions have important policy implications as they may provide insights of how and where government agencies and NGOs could allocate scarce resources to increase the capacity of local communities to adapt to changing environmental conditions such as climate change.
