Adaptive capacity in federal rivers: coordination challenges and institutional responses

Water crises have been described as crises of fragmented governance, particularly in transboundary settings where freshwater resources cross political borders. Federal rivers are transboundary river basins within or shared by a country with a federal political system. In federal political systems, the territorial division of authority creates incentives for local innovation, learning and adaptation; it also creates barriers to cooperation and conflict resolution needed for adaptive capacity across scales. This review examines the relationship between institutional design and adaptive capacity in federal rivers in three steps. First, we review coordination challenges in federal rivers, highlighting such challenges as fundamental for adaptive capacity in multi-jurisdictional settings. Second, we examine institutional responses to these challenges. Finally, we review lessons about institutional design and performance from large-N studies of international and interstate rivers. Systematic efforts are needed to measure and compare institutional design in federal rivers. Such efforts must balance global inventories to measure institutional design variables with in-depth case studies to generate context-sensitive insights about the effectiveness of different approaches as well as the causal mechanisms linking institutional design with social, environmental and economic outcomes.