“Strengthening agricultural resilience requires innovative approaches to both climate adaptation and mitigation. Central to this effort is effective water governance, encompassing policy, incentives, partnerships, and capacity building.”
Following her seminar at the 2025 Stockholm World Water Week, “Water for food in a changing climate: Pathways to adaptation and mitigation – System level policies and partnerships,” DWFI’s Renata Rimšaitė explores how water governance can better support resilient agricultural systems in a recent opinion piece published in PLOS Water.
In the article, Rimšaitė argues that effective water governance must work locally before it can scale, and that farmers must see governance frameworks as practical, trustworthy, and responsive to real-world conditions. Drawing on three examples from the U.S. High Plains, she highlights how farmer-centered approaches can balance groundwater regulation with agricultural productivity under increasing hydrologic variability.
Across these cases, Rimšaitė outlines several key recommendations for strengthening water governance:
- Design governance at the local level. Decentralized authority, adaptive rules, and inclusive stakeholder engagement allow policies to respond to local hydrology, climate variability, and farming realities.
- Ensure governance frameworks work for farmers. Trust, flexibility, and demonstrated benefits are essential for adoption and long-term success—particularly when scaling beyond pilot efforts.
- Pair regulation with incentives and learning networks. Combining regulatory structure with voluntary programs, peer-to-peer learning, and extension support can drive meaningful behavior change.
- Close the gap between adaptation and mitigation. While progress on climate adaptation in agriculture is evident, Rimšaitė notes that mitigation efforts—linking water management to energy efficiency and emissions reduction—remain underdeveloped and require further investment and data.
Together, these lessons demonstrate that water governance succeeds when farmers are partners, not just participants, and when stewardship of water resources is tied to long-term agricultural viability.
Read the full opinion piece to learn how farmer-driven governance models, trust-based collaboration, and locally grounded policies can evolve and scale to meet the water and climate challenges facing agriculture today: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000470
