The potential for adaptive water governance on the US–Mexico border: application of the OECD's water governance indicators to the Rio Grande/Bravo basin

Despite decades of political commitments, laws and agreements and significant policy effort, the governance system in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin is not able to meet the water demands generated by a growing region. Long stretches of the river are completely dry for much of the year, and water managers cannot meet full allocations to water users, let alone ensure water quality and quantity for environmental services and sustainability. Both academic scholarship and policy analysis attribute failures such as this to the inability of current water governance regimes to respond to rapidly changing circumstances – to ‘adapt’. The adaptive governance literature calls for resource management regimes that are distributed yet coordinated through polycentric arrangements, as well as flexible; that promote broader engagement and that generate and disseminate knowledge as well as stimulate learning in the face of complexity and uncertainty. This paper reports on the results of qualitative empirical research which applies the OECD’s water governance indicators as a diagnostic tool in order to identify the most significant adaptive governance gaps in the transboundary Rio Grande/Bravo basin.