Much of the research on climate change adaptation in rapidlyurbanizing developing regions focuses primarily on adaptation orresilience as the goal, assumes that climate change is the majorstressor, and focuses on the household or the city as the unit ofanalysis. In this article, we usefindings from two rapidly urbanizingsub-basins of the Cauvery River in southern India (the Arkavathyand Noyyal sub-basins) to argue for a broader analytic and policyframework that explicitly considers multiple normative concernsand stressors, and uses the entire watershed as the unit of analysisto address the climate-water interaction