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The starting point for this Special Issue is the proposition that climate change is real and anthropogenic factors contribute to the nature and rates of change. In its Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified major consequences for water resources as a result of global warming (IPCC 2007). Adaptation around these impacts will be integral to the evolution of water resources management. However the idea that socio-ecological systems based around water governance will have to adapt over time clearly is not new, nor confined to climate change impacts. Nonetheless, climate change introduces a strong impetus, and under this aegis, we explore in this Special Issue how climate change becomes ‘real’ in the lives of citizens and the activities of policy makers through the lens of water and its governance, including management. Moreover, ‘[t]his situation is one of global concern; it raises questions of how water policy makers, policy implementers and researchers will work together to enhance social and institutional innovation for effective implementation of climate change adaptation policies in different countries’ (Ison et al. 2011). Not all articles adopt climate change as the core paradigm for analysis, but all explore in various ways the systemic and adaptive effectiveness of water governance in circumstances where change is a central dynamic. To this extent, the articles have a common theme in that adaptation in water governance is best understood ‘as a co-evolutionary dynamic’ (Collins and Ison 2009). Globally there are many real-time ‘experiments’ in water governance under way. It is therefore timely to pause and offer some critical reflections on the viability of these ‘experiments’ in this Special Issue. We refer to ‘water governance experiments’ to acknowledge that we are entering a period where there is a need, in a climate changing Water Resour Manage (2011) 25:3971–3976 DOI 10.1007/s11269-011-9902-2

Water Governance in a Climate Change World: Appraising Systemic and Adaptive Effectiveness