As one of the countries highly vulnerable to climate change, Nepal has developed climate adaptation policy objectives and integrated risk management strategies to avoid severe impacts from changing climatic conditions. The country has been developing local level adaptation initiatives to create synergy between the policy objectives at the higher levels and location-specific needs of communities. This dissertation analyzes how these initiatives have been shaped by the national and global level discourse on climate adaptation and how they translate into building resilience at the community level. More specifically, using the case of Nepal’s flagship adaptation programs - Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) and Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) - this dissertation seeks to understand institutional and technological innovations that contributed to the governance of climate adaptation initiatives in Nepal. Methodologically, this dissertation applies a mixed method. Quantitative data was collected by interviewing local level stakeholders using semi-structured questionnaires and from policy documents. The transcripts from the open-ended interviews with the regional and national level stakeholders form the basis for qualitative analysis. Overall, the findings from this dissertation reveal that most of the adaptation activities proposed by local communities were low cost, based on experiential learning, and could be implemented by mobilizing local resources. The case of LAPA shows that community-based adaptation activities are strongly connected to local development goals, revealing the synergy between adaptation policy objectives and development. Likewise, the case of CSA demonstrates how innovations, both technological and institutional, are fostered to co-produce locally specific knowledge required to adapt to changing climate. The collaborative efforts by different institutions operating at multiple levels for scaling CSA through the Climate Smart Village approach provide justification for working together to address the climate adaptation policy objectives. The findings of this dissertation also reveal that the distinction between local and scientific knowledge makes little sense at the community level as successful climate adaptation requires hybrid approaches. This dissertation makes a strong case to enhance the governance of adaptation initiatives through stronger collaboration between local to national and global actors.

This paper introduces the papers in this special issue and uses them as evidence through which to examine four questions. First: are we witnessing a widespread (re)turn to big infrastructure projects for water management? The evidence suggests that large-scale infrastructure development has remained largely unswayed by the 'ecological turn', or the promotion of demand management or 'soft path' thinking, despite a drop in investments observed at the turn of the 20th century. Second: do these new projects have different justifications from those of the past? The papers in this issue provide evidence that the need to justify capital-intensive infrastructure in the face of commitments to sustainability, while borrowing from the conventional grammar of project justifications, has generated a few innovative tropes and rhetorical devices. Third: what does a (re)turn (or enduring commitment) to big infrastructure tells us about the governance and wider politics of large-scale infrastructure problems?

Some of the traditional interest groups are well represented in the stories told here - the corporations that demand water or compete to build pipes and dams; the large-scale irrigators that rely on water to expand their production; the engineers and consultants who seek money, prestige, career advancement or even satisfaction from 'controlling' nature; the politicians who can extract 'rents' from all this activity. Even so, the history of each particular project involves many contingencies - of the society's history, of previous rounds of infrastructure and of capital availability. Fourth: have there been changes in the scale at which water is managed within countries? In general, it seems there has been an increase in the scale of projects, generally involving a shift in power away from regional and up to multi-regional agencies of governance, such as the central state. Sometimes these shifts in scale and power have no effect on the salience of local voices - because in the past they were never heard or generally suppressed anyway. Sometimes the shifts in power and scale have been accompanied by increasing suppression of local voices of opposition. In one case - South Africa - the change in scale has seen a stand-offbetween representatives of new voices and the infrastructure-focussed engineering elite.