On the evaluation of adaptation practices: a transdisciplinary exploration of drought measures in Chile

Abstract

© 2018, Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature. A severe drought has affected central Chile since 2009. Various adaptation responses have been developed, and a participatory process is required to learn from them. To enable this, a transdisciplinary approach was adopted to achieve two objectives: first, to test an approach for assessing the effectiveness of existing measures to respond to drought, specifically to distil strengths and weaknesses of implementation, and developing recommendations; second, to reflect on results from a pilot project conducted to ascertain its potential for scalability in terms of processes employed. The research was organized per the three types of knowledge needed to address complex problems through transdisciplinarity: systems, target and transformation knowledge. Using the recent drought as a boundary object, we conducted the pilot in two locations in Chile where we carried out literature reviews, interviews and focus group discussions were carried o