Water governance of Andean river valleys that are the site of large-scale water transfers and the home to highland communities with their own irrigation practices has been the subject of research and debate since the large water transfers began. In Peru, local and regional water governance has been shaped by changing national water laws that remain controversial regarding their effects on highland water users. This article presents findings from the Colca Valley, where water has been transferred to the Majes Irrigation Project since 1983, while many highland communities still struggle to access sufficient irrigation water. It summarizes the attempts by Colca Valley communities to protect their water rights and water management institutions under a system oriented to regional and national rather than local water resources management, with a detailed discussion of the community of Coporaque. It also presents data on the area's highly variable water allowances and water use patterns, which demonstrate the need for more transparency and agro-ecological understanding of local irrigation needs and efforts to support them. Processes of representation, participation, and water redistribution are discussed as critical issues in improved regional water governance in the Colca Valley.

Improving water governance in the Andes is one of Peru's biggest challenges. This article examines the state's role in the water supply of an Andean community. Thirty years ago the community resisted the state's interference in its water management but now it has adopted a state model. The present article examines this change in the context of 2 occasions: the Peruvian state's investment in a new channel in the area and the community's confrontation with the state to gain access to this infrastructure. In the article, it is suggested that rather than viewing the confrontation as a form of resistance against the state's interference in Andean irrigation, we can see it as a way of opposing the state's water policy that privileges Peru's coastal desert at the cost of the country's highlands. It argues that, paradoxically, the community's success in challenging this policy and gaining rights to new water sources has prompted it to recognize the state as a legitimate water governor. The article concludes that, to overcome Andean communities' distrust of the state, the state must allow communities to play an active role in water management and assure water equity in Peru.

Scientists and policymakers increasingly recognize the critical dependence of urban and agricultural economies and livelihoods on mountain systems. Mountain systems feed critical watersheds, provide diverse commodities, enable recreation, and host competing settlement uses that also affect downstream water quality and quantity in aquifers, lakes, and streams. Many scientists from diverse disciplines are focused on the problem of how to govern common water systems that are subject to diverse—often competing—property regimes, organizational/agency interests, and national, local, state, and indigenous jurisdictions. Given the political obstacles to creation of nested organizational authorities, the current literature suggests that organizational actors may collaborate based on water's shared importance and build voluntary systems of networked governance that produce beneficial institutional relations and political regimes. Barriers to this ideal of collaboration include competing legal rights, identity politics, and state or national boundaries at larger scales. A key question arises: How can staff of relevant agencies, who are concerned about the threats to environmental goods, work toward cooperative governance when certain barriers impede collaboration between their organizations? We explore this question based on the case example of a complex aquifer and related river system in northern Idaho and eastern Washington that are transected by competing state, tribal, and local jurisdictions and are impacted by historic mining pollution, deforestation, and recent amenity-driven urbanization. Exploratory interviews with agency actors, document analysis, and observation of collaborative meetings confirm that individual employees can be key actors in developing transboundary governance, despite legal and organizational impediments to collaboration between their organizations. The case supports recent literature on scalar politics that shifts the emphasis away from ideal structures and focuses instead on better understanding of the ways in which creative actors may build collaborative institutions within existing structures.

In times of increasing uncertainty because of climate and socioeconomic changes, the ability to deal with uncertainty and surprise is an essential requirement for the sustainability of alpine water governance. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the adaptive capacity of water governance arrangements in the Swiss Alps and to propose options for reforms. To this purpose, we evaluated the current arrangements and the ways the actors have dealt with water shortages in the past, based on qualitative interviews and a document review. The research revealed that the adaptive capacity of the investigated arrangements is rather high with regard to reactive ways of responding to water shortage problems. However, there is limited capacity to proactively anticipate possible changes and to find prospective solutions on a regional scale. We conclude that with increased environmental and social pressures, forms of proactive water resource governance should be introduced, taking into account the welfare of people in both upstream and downstream areas.

Increasing pressure on mountain water resources is making it necessary to address water governance issues in a transdisciplinary way. This entails drawing on different disciplinary perspectives, different types of knowledge, and different interests to answer complex governance questions. This study identifies strategies for addressing specific challenges to transdisciplinary knowledge production aiming at sustainable and reflective water governance. The study draws on the experiences of 5 large transdisciplinary water governance research projects conducted in Austria and Switzerland (Alp-Water-Scarce, MontanAqua, Drought-CH, Sustainable Water Infrastructure Planning, and an integrative river management project in the Kamp Valley). Experiences were discussed and systematically analyzed in a workshop and subsequent interviews. These discussions identified 4 important challenges to interactions between scientists and stakeholders—ensuring stakeholder legitimacy, encouraging participation, managing expectations, and preventing misuse of data and research results—and explored strategies used by the projects to meet them. Strategies ranged from key points to be considered in stakeholder selection to measures that enhance trustful relationships and create commitment.

The Alps and the Andes are both considered water towers in their respective continents and are thus significant not only for their own water needs but also for those of lowland regions farther downstream. As climate change impacts on the hydrology of mountain regions are increasingly observed, attention is turning to the adaptive capacity of the water governance regimes in mountain communities. This paper explores the adaptive capacity of two contrasting water governance regimes in the Swiss Alps and the Chilean Andes. It assesses adaptive capacity by analyzing a set of governance-related adaptive capacity indicators in the context of recent extreme events, which serve as proxies for future climate change. Across these highly contrasted governance contexts, analysis reveals both similar and distinct institutional challenges for developing and mobilizing adaptive capacity in relation to climatic uncertainty and change. It also identifies emergent tensions related to temporal and spatial scales. Conclusions point to the need to focus on challenges relating to trust, integration of hydroclimatic information, and flexibility and iterativity of rules and plans across governance scales to better manage the exacerbating impacts of both climate variability and climate change.

Knowledge about the extent of irrigated land in Colombia is scarce because most irrigation is done informally and therefore not registered. Informal irrigation in Colombia has not been investigated, its national presence has not been identified, and its characteristics are still unknown. The present article aims to help fill this gap. Because of topographical and agricultural patterns, Andean informal irrigation is impossible to identify or characterize using standard methods. To provide information on the scale of informal irrigation systems in Colombia, their type, the users they serve, and the type of water sources they use, a large-scale partial inventory was made combining statistical analysis, questionnaires, interviews, and field trips. The findings indicate that informal irrigation is widespread in the country's mountainous zones, in a great diversity of environments, characterized by an equally great diversity of local uses and water-use strategies. This diversity has resulted from the coexistence of very different community and state institutions, posing challenges for planning and organizing water-resource management more efficiently and sustainably for producers, the government, and other stakeholders.

International mountain conservation paradigms have shifted in the past 30 years from establishment of centrally governed protected areas that exclude communities, to collaborative and community-based conservation stewardship with communities that depend on resources for their livelihoods. The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention) embodies this collaborative paradigm by suggesting that people and local governments can be collective stewards for the “wise use” of wetlands on which they depend for water resources and livelihoods. Although collaborative approaches are increasingly recommended to govern large and complex mountain waterscapes across multiple jurisdictions, recent international case study comparisons highlight the site-specific nature of institutional design and the effect that changing social relations and overlapping or conflicting rights and boundaries have on promised collaborative outcomes. This article illustrates the usefulness of a recently developed community-based natural resource management comparative framework for assessing the feasibility of collaboratively governing a proposed Ramsar wetland in the Southern Andes of Ecuador across multiple communities and jurisdictional boundaries. By using data from a rapid ethnographic assessment, US and Ecuadorian students and faculty found local and institutional support for wetland protection. The framework's preconditions were useful in identifying conflicts among and within communities, and among agency rules and resources; these conflicts could limit the feasibility of community-based and collaborative management unless coordination authority is clarified, especially at the proposed transboundary scale. This study showed that increasing attention to land tenure conflicts and institutional frameworks is needed for any collaborative governance design to be sustainable, which confirms political ecology findings.

Increasingly, attention in regional, national, and international water governance arenas has focused on high-altitude wetlands. However, existing local water management practices in these wetlands are often overlooked. This article looks at the irrigation activities of alpaca herders in the community of Ccarhuancho in the Central Andes of Peru. For more than two centuries, they have been constructing small-scale irrigation canals to maintain and expand the local wetlands, called bofedales. The seminomadic character of alpaca herders complicates irrigated wetland activities, such as operation and maintenance. Climate change and human and animal population pressure have increased not only the importance of these irrigation systems but also of local conflicts and communal decision making. Local irrigation activities in Ccarhuancho go unnoticed in broader water governance arenas because of its remoteness, limits to what popular new analytical tools can measure, a general undervaluation of wetlands, and a tendency of the canals to merge over time with the surrounding bofedales, making them less visible. Nevertheless, these man-made systems account for 40% of the wetlands in the study area and risk being seriously degraded or destroyed without local water management. With climatic changes affecting existing natural wetlands, the local herders were the first to recognize and respond to these changes and to defend the wetlands against degradation. Their efforts are, however, largely overlooked, even though such local water governance practices are crucial for the success of regional and national water governance in the Andes and other mountain areas. (Note: The title of this paper is an adaptation of Netting's [1974] paper “The system nobody knows” about small-scale irrigation in the Swiss Alps.)

In the high mountain valleys of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, gravity-flow irrigation systems support the production of grains, fodder, vegetables, herbs, and fruits as well as wood for fuel and construction purposes. In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, major changes in the organization of society and agriculture have occurred which, when combined with the effects of population growth and outmigration in recent decades, have fundamentally altered the normative and organizational arrangements that had sustained hill irrigation in the past. This article presents 2 case studies, one from the Alaikuu area of Tar Valley, Osh Province, Alai mountain range, southern Kyrgyzstan, and the other from the upper Shokhdara Valley in Gorno-Badakhshan, Pamir mountain range, eastern Tajikistan. A combination of rights and obligations form the foundation of self-managed offtake systems, the rules for which reflect existing social relationships. The importance of authority to the effective management of these systems is highlighted. Multiple forms of authority coexist at the local level in the Alai and Pamir ranges because of the recent introduction of formal local government and water governance reforms in both countries and the persistence of informal local political institutions, such as the court of elders in Alaikuu and the village headman in Shokhdara. Population growth and diversified livelihood strategies, especially migration, have encouraged a degree of individualism—an attitude that undermines the recognition of authority required for the collective management of hill irrigation systems. An understanding of the heterogeneous role of authority in irrigation management that does not privilege externally created formal institutions is required for government and nongovernment agencies to support hill irrigation and mountain agriculture.

This study is the first to have surveyed the population of black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis) at the Longbao National Nature Reserve, Qinghai, China, throughout most of the 7.5 month annual crane residence period, with 17 crane counts having been made on the reserve's main wetland between 6 April and 16 November 2011. In 2011, the first cranes are believed to have arrived at Longbao at the end of March, and the last are believed to have departed between 7 and 11 November. The peak adult black-necked crane count was 216 on 25 April, while the low count was 81 on 23 October, which increased to 153 during migration staging on 6 November. This represents a 9-fold increase in the peak annual adult crane count since the earliest known count from 1984. Twenty-nine nests were observed in the survey area in May and June, and on 12 September 2011, 21 of 29 nesting pairs had surviving chicks, with 9 crane pairs having a pair of surviving chicks, while 12 crane pairs had a single surviving chick. Threats to cranes at Longbao include untied dogs, which harass breeding cranes, eat eggs, and kill chicks; recently erected power lines along the wetland, which may prove hard for cranes to see and avoid; and disturbance of nesting cranes from humans and their livestock. Other threats include climate change, which is drying up shallow wetlands in the Longbao region and elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau, and severe degradation of hillslope pastures, which is forcing local herders to keep their yaks on the main wetland pastures for longer periods each year and will inevitably cause increased disturbance to cranes and further degradation of the wetland. The Longbao Wetland presently qualifies for Ramsar designation based on its black-necked crane population under Ramsar Criteria 2 and 6.

The black-necked crane (Grus nigricollis, BNC), a migratory bird classified as vulnerable under the revised IUCN Red List, faces serious threats from human activities and habitat degradation. We measured the changes in the number, habitats, and roosting sites of wintering BNCs in Huize Nature Reserve, northeast Yunnan, China, based on remote sensing images from 1992 and 2006 and field data from 1991 to 2009. The wintering BNCs foraged collectively in muddy bottomlands and cultivated fields. The number of BNCs increased from 320 in 1991 to 738 in 2009, but their roosting sites decreased from 12 between 1990 and 1995 to 6 in 2009. Most BNCs, similar to what is described in other studies, spent nights in the wetlands; but some were forced to roost on dry hill slopes, an unusual roosting site for BNCs. From 1992 to 2006, cultivated fields increased from 17.35 to 34.45%, woodlands decreased from 40.89 to 35.80%, and shrublands decreased from 36.72 to 20.74%. Of the total usable food in BNC habitats, 65.8% was seeds and tubers—potato, turnips, and wild radish—found especially on the soils of muddy bottomlands and cultivated fields. We conclude that abundant food (especially potato residues) available near the surface of soils of traditionally cultivated fields benefits the survival of wintering BNCs and that the wintering BNCs are forced to choose new habitats for the nights when wetland habitats are degraded and human disturbance increases.

We studied the distribution and composition of plant communities along an altitudinal gradient on the arid western slopes of the Helan Mountains in northwestern China by means of multivariate analyses. Two data sets that originated from fieldwork in 2005–2006 were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA), resulting in 3 major vegetation categories: desert shrubland, desert grassland, and prairie shrubland. Ordination based on canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) divided the desert shrubland category into a Caragana tibetica community, a Salsola passerina–Oxytropis aciphylla community, and a Reaumuria soongarica–S. passerina community; the desert grassland category into a Stipa grandis community and a Stipa breviflora community; and the prairie shrubland category into an Ulmus glaucescens–Prunus mongolica community, a P. mongolica–Potentilla fruticosa community, and a P. mongolica community. In the desert shrubland category, the C. tibetica, S. passerina–O. aciphylla, and R. soongarica–S. passerina communities appear consecutively along the soil alkalization gradient, and the C. tibetica, R. soongarica–S. passerina, and S. passerina–O. aciphylla communities appear consecutively along the soil texture gradient. In the desert grassland category, the S. breviflora and S. grandis communities appear consecutively along the soil water gradient. In the prairie shrubland category, the U. glaucescens–P. mongolica, P. mongolica–P. fruticosa, and P. mongolica communities appear consecutively along the soil organic matter and total nitrogen gradient, while the P. mongolica, P. mongolica–P. fruticosa, and U. glaucescens–P. mongolica communities appear consecutively along the soil pH gradient. Better understanding of these and similar relationships can enable better management of arid and semiarid ecosystems, which may be more vulnerable to such environmental factors than their counterparts in more humid regions.

Mountains and the sea are an ideal combination—not just for tourists but also for second homes and main homes of people who appreciate the amenities of both types of natural spaces. In the case of the Valparaíso–Viña del Mar agglomeration, the short distance to the Chilean capital, Santiago; access to a World Heritage Site (the city center of Valparaíso); and access to the leisure facilities of Chile's most attractive coastal spa (Viña del Mar) complement the amenities offered by nature. This paper provides information on the dynamic real estate market and the growth of the commercial sector in this agglomeration. It shows that high prices for domiciles with a sea view have led to new urban development farther inland. Thus mountain amenities are becoming more attractive to people moving to the Pacific Coast; however, the ongoing housing development can hardly be considered to correspond to the objectives of sustainable urban development.

The Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion (CONDESAN) was established in February 1993 after a series of consultations among different regional stakeholders working on sustainable development. Inspired by Agenda 21, which emerged from the Rio 1992 Earth Summit, and influenced by the ecoregional approach, CONDESAN was created as a platform to promote research for development throughout the Andean region. The Consortium is now celebrating its 20th anniversary.

This article discusses historical patterns of energy supply, electricity generation, and sectoral energy consumption as well as the emission of energy-related greenhouse gases during 1995–2008 in 5 Hindu Kush–Himalayan countries, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and reviews major studies that predict energy use and greenhouse gas emissions during 2005–2030 in the absence of climate policy interventions. It presents a range of energy use and greenhouse gas emission projections for the selected countries as a whole, and for the Hindu Kush–Himalayan areas in those countries for 2030. This study shows a need to establish a spatially disaggregated (district-level) energy database in the Hindu Kush–Himalayan countries to enable more accurate estimates of energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions in the region.