As climate change impacts are becoming ever more apparent, developing the necessary capacity to adapt to these new conditions is essential. In a world of intensifying droughts, floods, and shrinking freshwater reserves, water resources are pushed to their pressure points. Governance arrangements thus must be designed in order to control access to and distribution of water resources to ensure their equitable and sustainable management in the face of increasing variability, scarcity and overall uncertainty. National, federal and regional policies ideally aim to balance environmental, economic, and social needs by offering an orientation for long-term planning and inclusive management practices that engage diverse stakeholders. While many agree that transforming institutional contexts can play a significant role in making climate change adaptation more actionable—particularly in managing water resources—policy documents differ in their approaches to fostering cross-sector coordination, integrating diverse knowledge systems, and restructuring management frameworks to pursue their stated long-term objectives.
One prominent approach in resource management is adaptive water management, which prioritizes flexibility and the ability to adjust policies and practices in response to changing conditions and emerging knowledge. By passing through iterative cycles of planning, implementing, monitoring, adjusting, and evaluating, this approach undermines the importance of structured learning. While adaptive management is widely recognized by scholars as a viable solution for resource management, the extent to which adaptive management principles are embedded in policy strategies remains unclear. This paper explores water management in Germany through an institutional perspective, analyzing the extent to which adaptive management principles are integrated in existing German water management policies and governance structures.
The study deconstructs water management structures and institutions aiming to: (a) develop a catalog of adaptive management principles, and (b) evaluate the extent to which German policy documents facilitate adaptive management. The investigation combines semi-structured expert interviews with qualitative document analysis to explore strategies in water management. The analysis focuses both on overarching water management policies and on policies specifically addressing groundwater and drinking water supply. The study highlights the interplay between policies in fostering adaptive water governance.
While these documents inherently provide limited practical guidance for translating foundational ideas into actionable practices, some strategies advance adaptive water management by embedding flexibility, learning, and monitoring into their vision of collective action. Conversely, other strategies impede adaptive management by relying on rigid, linear management approaches that fail to accommodate dynamic environmental and social conditions. The study concludes with policy recommendations to integrate adaptive management principles into institutional design, alongside propositions to better align climate adaptation efforts, thereby enhancing the overall resilience and adaptive capacity of water governance systems.
