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Abstract Water governance in the Rio del Carmen watershed has failed to achieve sustainable water use, generating social conflicts, water overexploitation, and grassland loss. This leaves it unable to adapt and learn, to reconcile different stakeholder perspectives and to adequately respond to uncertainty. Adaptive water governance regulates water access through flexible, inclusive and innovative institutions, increasing system adaptive capacity in the face of uncertainty. This is necessary for water-scarce systems since they suffer context-specific exposure to land degradation and climate change. This research focuses on how water governance regulates water access in the Rio del Carmen watershed, Mexico, identifying key legal and institutional features that could increase adaptation and secure water resources in the long-term. 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders in the watershed, in order to understand the water governance structure and its system dynamics. It was found that water mismanagement, overexploitation, and conflicts over access to water are due to the lack of application and neglect of formal rules. Results indicate that breaches of the legal framework are commonplace, permitted by corruption of both former and current government officials. Many farmers have institutionalized this corruption in order to access water; increasing social conflicts and hindering any type of planning or water management, which, in turn, continues to affect the ecological conditions of the watershed. By understanding the governance system, its structure and the interactions that weaken and bypass formal institutions to the detriment of water resources, stakeholder engagement has emerged as an entry point for enabling collaboration and acceptance of formal institutions. This process has the potential to create a formal network, as a Watershed Committee, that could be honoured in practice through the efficacy of this engagement. Graphical abstract Unlabelled Image Highlights • Decentralised water governance is ineffective if it mismatches the societal scale for participation and its coordination. • Adaptive water governance fits for managing social-ecological systems in a dryland context, in the face of uncertainty. • Corruption is a driver and an outcome of inefficient formal institutions. • Disorganized agricultural development increases dryland degradation. • Informal institutions of stakeholder engagement have the potential to become a formal water management organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drylands are exposed to climate stressors, such as water scarcity, as well as societal stressors, including conflicts, which can make water governance unsuitable for the system's context. The emergence of adaptive water governance often takes places in these challenging contexts, but the process of achieving this style of governance requires a better consideration of system complexities. Using the Rio del Carmen watershed in Mexico as a case study, with primary data obtained through a questionnaire survey carried out with 217 farmers, this paper aims to identify the main complexities and needs to enable the emergence of adaptive water governance. We found that different groups of farmers converge in identifying system stressors and the main needs regarding water governance; yet, the ways these stressors are perceived differ between groups. The results indicate that contrasting perceptions are shaped by the different cultural roots and environmental conditions in the upper and lower parts of the watershed. This variation increases the difficulty in achieving collaboration and compromise when conflicts ensue. Reducing inequalities in the awareness of system stressors has the potential to enable adaptive water governance. This could be achieved through a peacebuilding technique with an appropriate cultural approach for the watershed's context in the early stages of a stakeholder engagement process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]