When watersheds span multiple administrative jurisdictions, ensuring the equitable division of responsibility, conflict resolutions and information sharing are all needed to achieve ecological balance, economic development, and social security. Under socio-ecological conditions full of uncertainties, diverse participating groups and multiple perspectives on resource threats need to be involved. Adaptive governance as a theory refers to the structures and processes by which people can address successive interventions and optimize governmental decisions. Through reviewing existing research and analyzing case studies, we uncover problems for shared water governance and highlight attributes of good adaptive governance processes. We emphasize the importance of learning, resilience, as well as accountability, and discuss how these features have the potential for building effective governance with adaptive capacity. We propose a conceptual model to help enable and measure the adaptive capacity for shared water governance at regional scale.