Building dryland resilience: Three principles to support adaptive water governance

Increasing dryland degradation and expansion shows that attempts to strengthen dryland resilience in the face of land degradation and climate change have not been successful. If current development pathways do not change, future prospects for the drylands are worrisome: potential large-scale migration, increasing water scarcity and land degradation, growing poverty, along with significant losses of key ecosystem services that support dryland social-ecological functioning. Based on our empirical research and the wider literature, we identify an important barrier to achieving resilience: poor integration of institutional and other human factors in shaping adaptive capacity, into ecosystem management. By exposing the need for a better understanding of the institutional setting, system stressors, and the human potential to face uncertainty, this paper integrates resilience and vulnerability approaches with adaptive governance, elucidating three principles that must be considered when moving towards more adaptive water governance. Use of these principles could represent a way forward to mitigate dryland degradation and the problems related to conflicts, marginalisation, and migration, increasing dryland resilience through water governance. The next steps should be the implementation of these principles in drylands or any ecosystem with undesirable states of water governance, to better integrate societal factors in efforts to strengthen dryland resilience.