摘要：When the availability of a vital resource varies between times of overabundance and extreme scarcity, managementregimes must manifest flexibility and authority to adapt while maintaining legitimacy. Unfortunately, the need for adaptabilityoften conflicts with the desire for certainty in legal and regulatory regimes, and laws that fail to account for variability oftenresult in conflict when the inevitable disturbance occurs. Additional keys to resilience are collaboration among physical scientists,political actors, local leaders, and other stakeholders, and, when the commons is shared among sovereign states, collaborationbetween and among institutions with authority to act at different scales or with respect to different aspects of an ecologicalsystem. At the scale of transboundary river basins, where treaties govern water utilization, particular treaty mechanisms canreduce conflict potential by fostering collaboration and accounting for change. One necessary element is a mechanism forcoordination and collaboration at the scale of the basin. This could be satisfied by mechanisms ranging from informal networksto the establishment of an international commission to jointly manage water, but a mechanism for collaboration at the basinscale alone does not ensure sound water management. To better guide resource management, study of applied resilience theoryhas revealed a number of management practices that are integral for adaptive governance. Here, we describe key resilienceprinciples for treaty design and adaptive governance and then apply the principles to a case study of one transboundary basinwhere the need and willingness to manage collaboratively and iteratively is high—the Okavango River Basin of southwestAfrica. This descriptive and applied approach should be particularly instructive for treaty negotiators, transboundary resourcemanagers, and should aid program developers
关键词：adaptive governance; international water law; Okavango; resilience; transboundary water governance; treaty;design
