Climate change and adaptive water manangement through tansboundary cooperation: the case of the Guadiana River Basin

In the EU, regions are acquiring greater decisional powers in the recent years. However, the ‘new regions’ do not longer correspond to the divisions that once were useful to the particular goals of the old nation-states, but are now created upon other new cooperation goals, including environment and sustainability, that transcend country borders. The mainstreaming of climate change into regional development goals and processes, including the adoption of new forms of governance and resource management related to adaptive management of shared resources such as transboundary river basins, entail the need to find new ways of cooperation and collaboration capable to erode existing regional divisions while at the same time developing new ones. We look at the role played by ‘atypical’ bridging organisations in the case of the Guadiana river basin, in Iberia, and to the extent that the new emerging cross-border institutional arrangements can be seen as an effective adaptive management response to mounting environmental threats such as climate change and water scarcity.