This article focuses on the processes impeding and facilitating adaptation to climate change within the urban water sector in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. The case study explores water management at the city scale, highlighting how actors currently respond to water stress and the challenges they face in integrating climate change information into water management. The shortage of usable scientific information to assist decision-making, along with weak leadership and legislation, are identified as the main obstacles which led to a lack of cooperation between stakeholders in Cape Town and therefore a lack of adaptation action.The authors suggest that the best ways to facilitate adaptation are to focus on areas where development needs and responses to climate change impacts are connected, and focus support on adaptation processes rather than outcomes. This approach is likely to ensure that climate change responses are not seen as competing with non-climate development priorities, but as part of the solution to them. It is asserted that this is likely to create incentives for the global South to respond to climate change.