ABSTRACT
This chapter breaks down into a general theme of how climate futures is closely affected by the state of water governance. Over the last two decades, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been a dominating global water paradigm. Mainstreaming adaptation perspectives in the IWRM for water governance across different government and institutional sectors remains important in sustaining the global climate cycle. IWRM is best implemented at the smaller governance scales, such as regencies and villages. Therefore, this chapter takes on a local case study of West Java Province, Indonesia, with the context of the decentralisation of water governance at the subnational level of political governance. West Java implemented the first IWRM project in the nation as a loan package of overseas development aid. However, a technocratic approach and experimental policies dominate aid disbursement and the types of projects engaged, with only minimal attention to the integration of sociopolitical and institutional adaptation capacity and the biophysical aspects of water resources. While institutional adaptation might be experimental and reactive at the initial stage, the West Java case illustrates that political economy factors, mainly the conditionality of foreign aid, dictate what the aspects of the adaptation are and how institutions should adapt to IWRM, decentralisation of government, and aid objectives at once. I argue that the institutional complexities during the transitional period persist due to the inability to project long-term objectives and a set of incentives for water governance at a subnational level. Therefore, the relations among government agencies across scales become transactional to increase their respective share of aid management, working further against establishing adaptive regional water governance.
