Paper short abstract:

While policy-makers talk about climate change, communities across the Global South are busy adapting on their own account. Our paper examines how communities innovate local water governance institutions in order to support autonomous adaptation strategies, and what this means for water justice.

Paper long abstract:

Water is critical to the resilience of communities, and a key element in the autonomous climate change adaptation strategies whereby communities actively respond to climate change through their own collective or individual agency. Yet little is known about the institutional dimensions of such autonomous adaptation strategies, especially in relation to water: How do communities change and innovate local water governance institutions as they adapt to climate change, and what does this imply for water justice?

This paper examines how Maasai communities in Kenya innovate rules, norms and organizational mechanisms for water governance in order to facilitate their everyday climate change adaptation strategies. Drawing on a household survey and qualitative interviews we examine the nature and outcomes of institutional changes in water governance in three different land use settings in southern Kenya.

We find that these changes are characterized by creative processes of bricolage whereby community members mix customary, statutory and newly developed institutional practices, and combine both communal and private control of water and land in hybrid arrangements. We also find that these institutional innovations are conflictual and shaped by power relations – both within communities and with external actors - and that their development tends to favour the climate change adaptation strategies of some community members over others.

Our paper emphasizes the importance - and dilemmas - of supporting community led institutional change for just water governance in the context of climate change, and ensuring that poor households are not marginalised in the process.