The challenge of managing water resources in England is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, a situation reflected in many countries around the world. Cooperative and participatory forms of governance are now seen as one way of addressing this challenge. We investigated this assertion by focusing on five farmer irrigator groups in the low-lying east of England. The groups’ relationship with water resources management was interpreted through the lens of comanagement, which over the past decade has increasingly merged with the field of adaptive management and related concepts that derive from resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems theory. Working within a critical realist paradigm, our analysis was guided by the politicized... |