Climate adaptation management and institutional erosion: insights from a major Canadian port

Abstract

This paper performs an institutional analysis of the adaptation to climate change by ports, through a case study of the port of Vancouver, Canada. While previous literature has demonstrated the value of informal institutions for filling gaps left by formal institutions, the role of failed informal institutions has received less attention. Our analysis reveals how, in the case of an unprecedented challenge like climate adaptation, relying on informal institutions with less agency can actually erode the strength of existing institutions in a form of negative institutional plasticity. In this case, emerging polycentric governance was unsuccessful, unable to construct clearly demarcated responsibilities due to impedance by the path dependence of the current federalist system. The latter works well for traditional infrastructure investments with a closed pool of stakeholders, but not for ports where multiple scales of embeddedness, both horizontally and vertically, produce a collective action problem with no mechanism for resolution.

Keywords:

• climate change
• climate adaptation
• informal institutions
• governance
• ports

1. Introduction

Climate change generates both opportunities and risks. Infrastructure located along shorelines is especially vulnerable to climate change risks such as sea level rise (SLR) and hurricanes (Becker et al. 2013). Nicholls et al. (2008) estimated the value of assets in large coastal cities exposed to climate change at USD 3,000 billion in 2005, and expects it to rise to USD 35,000 billion or 9% of global GDP by 2070. Due to their coastal locations, ports are at the forefront of this challenge (Osthorst and Mänz 2012). Moreover, with supply chain and waterfront activities focusing around ports (Ng and Liu 2014; Nursey-Bray et al. 2013), they are critical infrastructure that sustain national and local economic prosperity. For example, SLR is identified as the primary risk of the port of San Diego (Messner, Becker, and Ng 2016); the port of Montreal is concerned with decreasing water level along the St. Lawrence River (Slack and Comtois 2016); ports along Tokyo Bay (Japan) need to be resilient to strong typhoons (Esteban, Takagi, and Shibayama 2016).

The approach to tackle climate change is twofold, namely mitigation and adaptation. While mitigation seeks to prevent climate change by reducing carbon emissions, adaptation accepts the likely consequences and enhances resilience to protect critical infrastructure from the consequences¹. Compared with humanitarian operations management which works from a disaster perspective (Pedraza-Martinez and van Wassenhove 2016), adaptation builds proactive responses to protect vulnerable population and assets. It strives not just to maintain an existing competitive position (Busch 2011) but to transform challenges into opportunities (e.g. the opening of the Arctic sea routes to general shipping due to melting Arctic ice, see Verny 2016). Climate adaptation management is also a key issue in business ethics (Ng et al. forthcoming), seeking to preserve economic and social wellbeing and recognising that those most vulnerable may have the lowest adaptive capacity. Climate change adaptation adds an additional temporal perspective to previous adaptation research, because its effects are not gradual and systematic but disruptive and rapidly changing (Linnenluecke, Griffiths, and Winn 2013), increasing the difficulty of institutional analysis and understanding.

Until recently there has been less work on climate change adaptation compared to mitigation (Linnenluecke, Griffiths, and Winn 2013; Ng et al. 2016), and there was a tendency to focus on physical constructions (e.g. dike, water defence) (Ekstrom and Moser 2013). By focusing on the management of adaptation, this paper explores how, even in cases where evidence exists of expected impacts and the uncertainty only relates to severity and frequency, a similar collective action problem and inertia still result. One challenge is that adaptation takes place mainly at a local scale (Bormann, Ahlhorn, and Klenke 2012; Füssel 2007; Peñalba et al. 2012; Walker, Adger, and Russel 2015). Another inherent feature of climate adaptation management is dealing with uncertainty (Walker et al. 2010), due to the difficulty to establish a reliable likelihood on when an event may happen based on past events, what impacts it may bring, how serious the damage could be, and whether adaptation measures might work. These generate substantial challenges to institutions – operating largely based on regulations, past experiences, and established practices – to introduce innovative solutions. This is complicated by the existence of multiple stakeholders (Becker et al. 2015). In ports, the port authority is usually not the only actor. For example, in tackling falling water level, the port of Montreal proposes dredging along the St. Lawrence River. As this poses unintended externalities on shorelines and ecological systems (Slack and Comtois 2016), it cannot make decisions based only on its self-interest, but needs to consider stakeholders that have interests along the waterfront (e.g. urban residents, environmental groups).

Climate change adaptation can be studied at various levels, from the individual decision-maker to the firm to the industry and the wider institutional setting (Linnenluecke, Griffiths, and Winn 2013), while also recognising the high level of interaction between levels (Slawinski et al. 2015). Each of these levels could produce valuable findings of relevance to the port sector. In this paper, we have chosen to take an institutional perspective, seeking to understand how divergent perspectives can be reconciled and engender a shared responsibility to act (Ansari, Gray, and Wijen 2011). Previous research on climate adaptation management indicates that stakeholders often reach an impasse at the initial stage (e.g. problem identification, propose potential options) and fail to proceed to the next stage, (e.g. get stakeholders to commit to established adaptation strategies), as exemplified by the unsuccessful case of the port of San Diego (Messner, Becker, and Ng 2016). The expectation of financial commitments threaten the emotional competence (Voronov and Weber 2016) of decision-makers, causing stakeholders to become even more determined to protect the institutions to which they are affiliated, resulting in the unwillingness to sacrifice even marginal individual interests for the collective betterment. In such cases, Van der Voorn et al. (2017) demonstrate the importance of a shared vision to overcome the impasse and to increase stakeholder commitment for the long run.

In order to identify the different institutional influences on this emerging challenge, this paper applies the theoretical framework of Huntjens et al. (2012) that identified eight principles of successful institutional design. Empirical application is based on a case study of the port of Vancouver, BC, Canada. While the first goal of the paper is to identify the major institutional influences on successful climate adaptation in the port sector, the choice of this industry can produce findings relevant to other sectors facing similar challenges. As noted by Becker et al. (2012), ports, like other sectors, are becoming more aware of this emerging problem and stakeholders generally agree on the necessity to tackle it; however, Ng et al. (forthcoming) have identified that climate adaptation management in the port sector is a classic example of the collective action problem frequently studied through institutional analysis. The data analysis takes a deductive approach by applying a theoretical framework to the case and particularly exploring the roles of multiscalar and polycentric governance (Huntjens et al. 2012) and the role of informal institutions (Root, van der Krabben, and Spit 2015).

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 begins with a very brief recap on the principal approaches to institutional analysis and then reviews the literature on institutional approaches to climate change adaptation, concluding by establishing the analytical framework. Section 3 introduces the case study methodology based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Section 4 presents the case study of the port of Vancouver, including its background, the impacts of climate change and its climate adaptation management strategies. The document and interview data is analysed in Section 5, identifying the major challenges related to the institutional setting, the port activities and interactions of the specific projects. Finally, Section 6 concludes with theoretical contributions and policy recommendations that can be generalised to the wider scholarly literature as well as professional practice.

2. Review of institutional literature and framework development

2.1. Institutions and institutionalisms

Institutions refer to the formal and informal rules that guide human behaviours (North 1990; Roberts and Greenwood 1997). Formal rules, such as laws and regulations, are explicit and set by legislators to govern the strategic choices of actors through various interventions and arrangements, while informal institutions, such as norms, customs, traditions and other social orders, are implicit and developed through interactions between actors (González and Healey 2005; Tongzon, Ng, and Shou 2015). Institutions have the power to guide and induce certain patterns or codes of behaviour. It is also important to recognise the distinction between institutions and organisations; according to North (1990), institutions represent the rules of the game, while organisations are the players. Having said that, an informal institution can be more than just a vague cultural norm but rather a fairly accepted and used network structure (often exploited by formal organisations) that nonetheless has no formal constitution, definition or power, more broadly interpreted as governance not defined in law (Hrelja et al. 2017). It is also important to remain cognisant that, while seeking stability, institutional forms are in constant flux (Jessop 2001).

Fabbrini and Molutsi (2011) identify rational choice and sociological institutionalism as the two pillars of institutional theory. In rational choice institutionalism, actors aim to maximise utility and advance individual interests (Pierson 2000), thus this perspective is closely aligned with transaction cost approaches. When setting targets, actors evaluate costs and benefits for different options and a specific institutional setting bounds their priorities. They prefer to achieve targets that are within their reach, rather than striving for less certain outcomes. In such a setting, institutions are more concerned with fulfilling short-term rather than long-term interests. Yet such perspectives are subject to change over time: “it may be rational for an actor to make an agreement, but equally rational to subsequently break it” (Pierson 2000, 480). Fuenfschilling and Truffer (2016) examined the creating, maintenance and disruption of institutions, considering the role of agency as institutional work (drawing on Lawrence and Suddaby 2006). Key issues included changing normative associations and then embedding them into day to day routines. They demonstrated the importance of understanding the interrelationship between agency and institutional structure, which will be relevant for this study in the context of how the actors attempt to develop an informal institutional network in order to overcome the current stasis of the formal institutions.

Instead of arguing that institutions are products of actors’ behaviour, sociological institutionalism emphasises social routine and cultural authority. In most cases, decisions based on rational choices are made to advance the interests of a single party which may then negatively impact the interests or power of others. Stakeholders must resolve conflicts of interest through negotiation, often referred to as “the logic of appropriateness” (Pierson 2000, 478). The existing institutional arrangements (e.g. policies, systems) are not necessarily the most efficient or effective, but instead those that are considered to be the ‘proper’ interventions in the cultural environment (Hall and Taylor 1996). To some extent, actors take these options for granted and alternative designs may not be recognised. Roberts and Greenwood (1997, 354--355) term this “pre-conscious institutionalisation” in contrast to “post-conscious institutionalisation”, which suggests that, although actors are aware of alternative options, they constrain them to a limited range, and each of the options result in incremental changes that are acceptable under culturally bounded circumstances. This is why institutions tend to exhibit high inertia and stable processes that preserve former designs (Keohane and Victor 2011).

Historical institutionalism bridges rational choice and sociological institutionalism, recognising that the evolution of current institutions is dependent on past legacies, thus the core concept in historical institutionalism is path dependency (Hall and Taylor 1996). From the perspective of sociological institutionalism, former arrangements set specific institutional and organisational goals that shape decision-makers’ values and beliefs. From the rational choice approach, conventional approaches generate stable/guaranteed returns (even if these approaches are not the most efficient), thereafter creating incentives to actors to fulfil anticipated targets at an acceptable level, and thus institutions “tend to evolve incrementally in a self-reproducing and continuity-preserving way” (Martin 2000, 80). When internal and external environments change, rules and practices may not work effectively, yet institutions can be change-resistant due to high setup costs, effects of learning, coordination effects, indeterminacy, and primacy of early events (David 1985; Arthur 1994). This results in a ‘lock-in’: it is difficult, if not impossible, to withdraw the adopted options (Scott 2014). Thus, historical institutionalism offers insight into why incremental modifications (stretching through institutional plasticity as suggested by Notteboom, de Langen, and Jacobs 2013), rather than aggressive changes, are more likely to occur.

2.2. Previous institutional analyses of climate adaptation management

A major problem of climate adaptation management is that it is difficult to assess the benefits generated by adaptation actions and is still under intense debate among researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers. For example, the value of a dike cannot be easily evaluated if no floods occur. Even if it occurs, it is debatable to what extent the dike protects the floodplain and what the associated benefits are. Moreover, the benefits of climate change adaptation are often indirect: due to the potentially long time horizon for adaptation actions to take effect, individuals or organisations that invest in adaptation may not be the ones who receive the benefits (Walker et al. 2010). The time lag issue is particularly critical for corporate responses to climate change (Slawinski and Bansal 2012). Additionally, the fact that adaptation works can be beneficial not only to the ones who make the investments, but also to other stakeholders, results in a free rider problem that also delays investment commitment, resulting in a ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 2003; Ansari, Wijen, and Gray 2013). Instead of being positively engaged, stakeholders prefer to wait for others to act.

As climate adaptation remains novel, management mechanisms are often based on voluntary, network-based processes with stakeholders from a rage of organisations across the public and private sectors (Becker 2016). The lack of coherent guidelines makes it difficult to establish a formal structure (Jantarasami, Lawler, and Thomas 2010), complicated by lack of coordination between local, regional and national government agencies (Walker, Adger, and Russel 2015). When regimes shift or conditions change, political priorities also shift and policies regarding long time horizons could consequently be overturned. Indeed, in climate adaptation management, responsibility allocation is very uncertain and stakeholders often struggle to identify what roles they should play. Peñalba et al. (2012) discussed adaptation efforts in the Philippines from social and institutional perspectives and argued for the pivotal role of cognitive enhancement and capacity building. Pahl-Wostl (2009) examined the role of social learning to overcome institutional lock in and noted the prevalence of single loop learning in climate change adaptation, a reluctance to challenge guiding assumptions or transform the structural context. In order to do so, informal networks with an open mandate are essential but also with a tangible and jointly produced product or outcome. These strategies help to embed the institution, allied to increased participatory processes and involvement of marginal groups in order to produce and maintain a coherent vision, as shown by Van der Voorn et al. (2017), yet those authors also found that involving different stakeholders may, in fact, produce or require a multiple vision to better address uncertainties. Hrelja (2015) described the normative management of such processes as a ‘steering culture’.

Path dependency of existing institutions exerts additional constraints on developing new adaptation strategies. Chhetri et al. (2010) examined how path dependency limited farmers’ choices to adapt to climate change. Barnett et al. (2015) investigated the drivers of barriers to climate change adaptation and identify path dependency in institutions as the primary reason. Institutional scale is also a key element. In an analysis of the literature on adaptive institutions, Koontz et al. (2015) highlighted the similarities and differences between federalist and polycentric models. The former is based on a more traditional nesting of scales with clear roles for each, while polycentric models exhibit a higher prevalence of porous borders and overlapping both vertically and horizontally. The authors showed how both approaches can be advantageous for promoting adaptation and empowerment to develop collective solutions to local problems, while also exhibiting potential challenges, such as fragmentation, transaction costs and the need for substantial effort from stakeholders.

Garrelts and Lange (2011) attested to governments’ central role in climate change adaptation in the German flood management system while also emphasising the functions of other stakeholders (i.e. academia, the media) to offer support and knowledge. Burch (2010) examined the challenges of climate adaptation by local authorities in Canada and concluded that path-dependant institutional structures needed to change. Key drivers of this change were posited to be strong leadership that can institutionalise climate adaption goals within the organisational culture as well as clear directives made explicit at the higher scales of governance. Root, van der Krabben, and Spit (2015, 705) highlighted the roles of informal institutions in adaptation planning, analysing the redevelopment of an ex-port area and finding that actors are ambivalent to introduce a new formal institutional structure but work within the “soft spot” (drawing on Mahoney and Thelen 2010), according to which they proceed through a “(re)interpretation or ignoring rules until the rules gain broader legitimacy and become part of a shared understanding”.

With increasing evidence highlighting the critical role of institutions in influencing adaptation to climate change, researchers have applied a wide range of theories. Marshall (2013) applied transaction cost theory to build a framework for institutional cost and benefit analysis, with a focus on path dependency that constrains adaptation management. A comprehensive model was developed by Araral (2013) by synthesising core views from three fields: Coase's property rights, Ostrom's governance principles for the public good and Williamson's transaction cost approach. Brunner and Enting (2014) also applied a transaction cost perspective, identifying incomplete institutions and information as obstacles in climate finance, particularly unclear property rights and vague responsibility allocation. Huntjens et al. (2012) applied the work of Ostrom (1990) to case studies of climate adaptation in the water sector and produced a modified framework of eight principles of institutional design in climate adaptation, namely: (1) defining boundaries clearly; (2) (re-)distributing risk, benefits, and costs equally and fairly; (3) collective choice arrangements; (4) monitoring and evaluating the process; (5) developing mechanisms for conflict prevention and resolution; (6) nested enterprise/polycentric governance; (7) developing robust and flexible processes; and (8) policy learning. Ostrom's work was designed to deal with governance of common pool resources, and the application by Huntjens et al. (2012) confirmed many of the institutional principles raised in the literature above, showing that polycentric approaches with high stakeholder participation necessitate the importance of social learning. This framework will be applied in the current research because it was developed in a case of water governance which, as a nationally strategic resource, has some similarities with the case of ports, and it provides a structure to capture the key issues highlighted in the literature review related to the governance of collective action problems.

3. Methodology

The methodology is based on a case study on the climate adaptation management undertaken by the port of Vancouver, BC, Canada. The focus is the ‘how’ of climate adaptation management. It offers the opportunity to identify the climate change risks that the port faces, learn about the adaptation strategies currently in place, or being planned, and explore the process of implementing these changes and the challenges faced under particular institutional constraints. Located along the Pacific shorelines of the BC province, Vancouver hosts the largest port in Canada. In economic terms, the port of Vancouver handles about 20% of the goods that move across Canada². Similar to many ports, the port of Vancouver is vulnerable to climate change impacts; consequently, facilities and infrastructure under its jurisdiction are at substantial risk.

The data sources consisted of documents and interviews. The documents collected included several reports and studies, in addition to policy and strategy documents of the various organisations, as well as text from news items and websites (these are identified and cited throughout the case study presented in the next section). Throughout 2016, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior policy-makers, industrial practitioners affiliated with PMV, Fraser Basin Council (FBC), governmental agencies from different hierarchies, private operators and environmental interest groups. They were selected through a snowball sampling technique starting from professionals in charge of climate adaptation management at PMV, and we asked them to recommend potential interviewees that they deemed relevant. Typical examples include environmental officers from PMV, a representative from the Fraser Basin Council, and a non-profit organisation dedicated to collaborating and coordinating issues on the Fraser River to advance sustainable development³. The discussion topics include identifying and discussing the top climate change risks that the port of Vancouver faces, the current adaptation efforts, the climate adaptation management process, obstacles in the way of adaptation, the current efforts to find solutions, and how the institutional system evolves due to the need for the port of Vancouver to adapt to climate change impacts. All interviews were transcribed.

The documentary and interview data were analysed by means of an analytical matrix based on the framework categories derived from the literature, a simplified version of which is presented in Section 5. Evidence from the documentary and interview data was noted against each of the framework categories, following an iterative process moving between the data and the matrix until no new additions to any category were identified. To further enhance our understanding, we held informal discussions with a number of senior scholars with research interests on climate change and adaptation management to sense-check the findings, the placement of evidence in each category and the interaction between the categories. This process helped to bridge the conceptual framework, raw data, category evidence and, finally, the construction on the concept of institutional erosion.

Table 2. Summarised version of the analytical matrix.

No.	Principle	Evidence
(1)	Clearly defined boundaries	• Table 1 shows the scale hierarchy. Clear responsibilities for certain traditional infrastructure investments. • No national or regional organisation has responsibility for adaptation. • National guidance in place for port mitigation but not for adaptation. • Lack of clear staff responsibility for climate change adaptation at PMV.
(2)	Equal and fair (re-)distribution of risks, benefits and costs	• PMV is located in high risk area, therefore they are motivated to take action. • Terminal operators less motivated as they might not benefit due to time-limited concessions. • Federal and BC Provincial Governments funded flood management capital works, but municipalities had to pay for rights of way and maintenance. • Municipalities do not have sufficient funds to unlock the rest of the funds from the Federal and BC Provincial Governments. • Individuals and firms incentivised to focus on short-term strategy and certain rewards. • The main resource committed by all stakeholders is staff time.
(3)	Collective choice arrangements	• Non-profit charitable organisation takes the lead but cannot force compliance. • PMV focuses on regional collaboration due to limited resources. • PMV participated in two projects led by others and contributed some funding. • Short electoral cycles incentivise lack of development of new arrangements.
(4)	Monitoring and evaluation of the process	• PMV has only begun to give consideration to adaptation in last 2–3 years. Adaptation plan is still not developed. • No clear targets or monitoring in place at any level, therefore lack of urgency.
(5)	Conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms	• The established informal network is fragmented and each actor pursues their own interests rather than producing a single coherent vision. • Objectives and visions of different stakeholders are not synthesised. • This network-based voluntary approach fails to provide a resolution to the problem of uncertainty. • It is easy for all stakeholders to appear to agree as long as no responsibility or resource beyond staff time is needed, hence the inertia.
(6)	Nested enterprises/polycentric governance	• Table 1 shows the scale hierarchy. Clear responsibilities for certain tasks, but difficult to allocate formal responsibility for this new challenge, hence the growth of informal networks. • Emerging polycentric model impeded by path dependence of traditional federalist model. • Federalist governance works for traditional infrastructure planning, but not for this new challenge.
(7)	Robust and flexible process	• Scenarios seem broadly accepted, but this has not led to agreement of objectives or actions. • Focus on traditional plan of dike improvement, but no paradigm shift. • Private organisations can participate in the stakeholder engagement to be seen to be doing something without committing resources. • PMV is inexperienced at adaptation, therefore proceeding slowly.
(8)	Policy learning	• Table 1 shows the scale hierarchy. Fairly clear rules of the game in terms of traditional infrastructure investment, but this new challenge requires new rules so different actors are currently still jockeying for power. • The current equilibrium is a stalemate; it is not clear which actor has the incentive and ability to break it. • It is not so much the formal structures preventing policy innovation, but lack of incentive among actors due to strategic considerations and short-term thinking. The fact that it is a new challenge makes it easy for existing organisations to avoid responsibility.

4. Case study: port of Vancouver

4.1. Overview of PMV

PMV is a financially autonomous public organisation established by the Canadian Federal Government in 2008, with governing directors appointed by the federal government, provinces and municipalities (Figure 1). It is adjacent to 16 municipalities and crosses territories and treaty lands that belong to several Coastal Salish First Nations. The jurisdiction of PMV encompasses more than 600 km of shoreline (InterVISTAS Consulting Inc 2013), from Burrard Inlet down to the Fraser River and Roberts Bank, and administers water and land that are critical to the municipal, provincial, and national economies. Most of its marine terminals are located in the City of Vancouver and the City of North Vancouver, and there are critical infrastructure and business activities (such as transition zones) along the Fraser River. In addition to 28 major deep-sea terminals, PMV is home to three Class 1 railroads (PMV website). The risk management team at PMV analysed more than 100 types of risk, and climate change was ranked as one of the top-12 major risks that the port faces. Interviewees agree that the main impact posed by climate change on the port is flooding from both the ocean and rivers.

Figure 1. Governance structure of port of Vancouver.

4.2. Climate change risks identified

4.2.1. Sea level rise (SLR)

Although the BC province is expected to be less vulnerable to SLR due to its mountainous landscape, the potential loss is still enormous due to the capitally intensive infrastructure that generates billions of dollars annually. Predominant components driving SLR can be changes from various regions, such as “changes in global ocean volume due to melting of ice caps, continental ice sheets and mountain glaciers”, “global and regional changes in ocean volume due to thermal expansion and salinity effects on water density” and “regional volume changes due to dynamic atmospheric and ocean processes” (Province of British Columbia (BC) 2008: 3). The BC province adopts a SLR curve by Ausenco Sandwell (2011) for planning and related policy-making, according to which the sea level is projected to rise by 1 and 2 m by 2100 and 2200, respectively. These forecasts are widely accepted and applied to scenario studies of shorelines and riverbanks (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2014a; Northwest Hydraulic Consultants 2014), while in the port of Vancouver, the ‘King Tides’ and storm surges have already threatened its daily operation. Two ‘King Tides’ in December of 2012 and 2014 flooded low areas and put shoreline infrastructure at huge risk, causing a partial abandonment and electrical component failure inside the port area.

4.2.2. Fraser River flooding

The Fraser River originates from Mt. Robson (part of the Canadian Rockies) and flows towards the western coastline of BC, draining around a quarter of the BC province (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2014b). It has a long history of flooding. The largest flood occurred in 1894, affecting half the BC province. FBC, a non-profit organisation dedicated to collaborating and coordinating issues along the Fraser River, forecasts that the changing climate could cause a repeat (potentially more than once and even more serious) of the 1894 flood in the coming five decades. Also, the possibility of reoccurrence is anticipated to be one-in-three (FBC website, Flood and the Fraser). It further reveals that if a flood with a similar magnitude as the 1894 flood occurs, the City of Chilliwack would suffer almost CAD 1 billion of economic casualty, and multiple times for the City of Richmond (FBC website, Flood and the Fraser). Although no studies currently flag the potential damage to the entire Fraser Valley communities, considering its dense population and highly developed economy, the BC Provincial Government suggests that the overall casualty could be tens of billions of Canadian dollars (BC Ministry Of Forests, Lands And Natural Resource Operations Website).

FBC identifies the primary causes of river flooding as “heavy rainfall, spring freshets⁴, ice jams, log jams, debris flows, sediment deposition, tsunamis and tidal cycles” (Fraser Basin Council 2010, 3). Global warming speeds up snow melting in rocky areas where the Fraser River starts. Also, the rising ocean water can cause rivers and streams to back up – a combined result of SLR, storm surge, and wave effects (Fraser Basin Council 2010). For instance, a joint study (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2014a) argues that a 0.2 to 0.4 m increase in flood level could occur based on the provincially recommended guideline of 1 m SLR by 2100. This may be challenging, especially for communities located in the middle and lower valley.

4.3. The role of PMV in climate change adaptation actions

4.3.1. National and regional flood management strategies

Work has been undertaken in recent years to establish the adaptation options in Canada, whereby the two main categories for flood management options have been classified as structural and non-structural. Ausenco Sandwell (2011) classified the options into four types. The first (protect) is structural, which involves building protective barriers. The other three are non-structural, namely ‘accommodate’ (accept occasional events and protect at the same time), ‘retreat’ (move back), and ‘avoid’ (limit development). To estimate the cost of adaptation to flooding, the BC Provincial Government organised two option selection workshops, with attendees from the project teams, municipal and provincial governments (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2012). Focusing on dikes was identified as the best option for 30 out of the 36 reaches studied. As agreed by various interviewees, dike development is possibly the most cost-effective approach to protect the floodplain, but also a reflection of conventional thinking, as this is what has always been done.

As most existing dikes follow the 1970s guidelines and are considered well below today's standard, upgrades become extremely important. The BC Provincial Government estimates that the cost of dike upgrades so as to accommodate 1 m in SLR by 2100 will be about CAD 10 billion. Most current dikes were constructed in the Fraser River Flood Control Programme (hereafter called Programme) between 1968 and 1995. During this period, the Federal and BC Provincial Governments undertook half of the investments in capital works, while rights-of-way and responsibilities of operation and maintenance fell to local authorities. Moreover, in 2007, the BC Provincial Government provided CAD 100 million for over a decade to construction works in flood management. However, the Programme requires the municipal authority to share up to 33% of the cost of capital works. As a result, not all municipal authorities participate in the Programme, citing limited resources (The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia 2012). According to its largely bottom-up planning tradition, the Federal Government devolves responsibility to local authorities. In other words, it is only when the local authorities agree to take on responsibilities for ownership, operation, and maintenance that a new dike would be approved for construction. However, there are nearly 105 local entities (municipal governments, dike districts and so on) that govern public dikes in the BC province (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations website, Dike management and safety). Diversity in these governance arrangements is a barrier to setting a unified standard. The expectation for a bottom-up approach, whereby a lower scale body takes the lead, means that financial allocation and responsibilities remain under continuous debate with no agencies willing to take the initiative and propose action plans. Even if the national or provincial authority undertakes the leadership role, a common funding standard may not be applied in all cases, which raises the issue of fairness; hence, after considerable public consultation, the process remains stalled.

In this case, PMV once considered taking up such a role. However, according to the interviewees, by doing so its jurisdiction would place it in a difficult position which necessitates collaboration with regional actors. Additionally, the relationship between PMV as the port authority and the private terminal operators must also be considered. As a ‘landlord’ port⁵, private terminals are expected to make their own strategic decisions, which are of course based not just on local priorities but their embeddedness within the globalised maritime system, characterised by the lack of global agreements or a market morality (Pinkse and Kolk 2012). Here the question is: should PMV be responsible for adaptation works or alternatively share the costs of investment with private terminal operators? On one hand, considering the uncertainty of climate change impacts, is it cost-effective for PMV to pay for adaptation measures? There are many studies on the cost-effectiveness of mitigation actions (e.g. shore power projects) because mitigation consequences are straightforward to quantify and benchmark. In contrast, how to overcome difficulties in measuring and benchmarking adaptation strategies remains a source of disagreement. On the other hand, given that terminal concession agreements are normally 30–50 years, terminal operators do not have much incentive to get involved in climate adaptation, as investing in such proactive works is more likely to benefit future tenants instead of themselves.

4.3.2. Climate change adaptation activities undertaken by PMV

It was only several years ago that PMV started to seriously consider climate change impacts and tried to connect them with (increasing) flood risks. In 2012, the annual maximum daily flows of the Fraser River at Hope⁶ reached a hazardous level of 11,700 ${\mathrm{m}}^3$/s (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2014a). This was higher than that of 2007 (10,800 ${\mathrm{m}}^3$/s) when the BC Provincial Government spent CAD 33 million for dike upgrades and other urgent flood mitigation projects to protect the floodplain (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations 2014a and Fraser Basin Council Website, Flood Projects). At that time, the port recognised the impact of climate change on the increasing flows during spring freshet and began to consider adaptation actions more systematically. The engineering team was assigned to undertake this responsibility. However, at this stage, it has still not developed an adaptation plan. A number of interviewees stated that the port has limited resources to take on climate adaptation management, from problem identification, scenario setting, and potential loss estimation to option generation and fund raising, along with implementation and evaluation. Thus, a large proportion of their work takes place as part of regionally collaborative activities led by others. It was actively involved in two projects during the past few years, one concentrating on SLR and the other dedicated to lower mainland flooding along Fraser River, which will be discussed in the following two sections.

4.3.3. Coastal flood risk assessment

The City of Vancouver adopted the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy (hereafter called ‘Adaptation Strategy’) in 2012 as a guideline to build a more sustainable and resilient city in facing climate change. As part of the Adaptation Strategy, a coastal flood risk assessment was proposed as a primary action in phase 1 to feed into the option exploration and discussion in phase 2 so as to facilitate the development of adaptation actions. The King Tide in 2012 prompted the flood risk assessment project. Given its interest as critical infrastructure in the City of Vancouver, PMV joined the project as a funding partner.

In December 2014, the City of Vancouver announced the risk assessment report prepared by Northwest Hydraulic Consultants. It developed five scenarios for risk modelling and accepted the third scenario as a base for vulnerability assessment. The third scenario constitutes elements of 2100, 1 m of SLR, 1:500 years as the return period and a joint probability method (probability that any of the high tide/Fraser flooding, storm surge and wave effect could take place simultaneously, instead of a simple sum of these numbers). In an example of flood risk mapping for Burrard Inlet, most port lands are expected to experience a flood depth (freeboard not included) of 0–0.5 m, some with 0.5–1.0 m and even 1–2 m. When the flood depth reaches 1–2 m, the ground floor would be flooded and residents must evacuate. Based on the flooding risk simulation, the City of Vancouver further drew a ‘hot spot’ map to demonstrate vulnerability, which confirmed that the port business is located in an area that is the most vulnerable to floods. Located on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, two cruise terminals, two container terminals, and five bulk terminals would experience serious operational disruption. To monetise the consequences, it adopts the model Hazus developed by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1992. It estimates damage from natural hazards and this report applies the Canadian version to a major flood assessment study. It offers insight on the potential loss caused by future possible floods, and the simulated cost is around CAD 660 million. However, as Hazus only includes tangible and some indirect tangible losses, with a focus on damages to buildings, this cost is deemed to be significantly underestimated (Port Metro Vancouver (PMV) 2015).

4.3.4. Lower mainland flood management strategy

The Lower Mainland Flood Management Strategy (hereafter called the ‘Strategy’) was launched in July 2014 and the study boundary stretches from Hope to Richmond and from Squamish to White Rock (FBC website, Flood Management). The Strategy constitutes two phases. Phase 1 (2014–2015) comprises analysis of flood scenarios through hydraulic modelling and simulation, vulnerability, consequences and cost assessment and a review of the existing policies and practices as an attempt to gain a better understanding of the current situation and potential future risk. The findings from phase 1 are expected to feed into phase 2 (commencing in 2016), where strategies and options will be developed, along with a focus on a sustained funding model and action implementation.

Coordinated and facilitated by the FBC, the Strategy is an inter-jurisdictional effort that brings 43 partners together to collaborate towards regional resilience to floods along the Fraser Basin. The involved stakeholders include the Federal Government, BC provincial ministries, 26 municipalities and other agencies (including PMV) that share common interests. They have completed phase 1 and in January 2016 the report of Project 1, Lower Mainland Flood Management Strategy – Analysis of Flood Scenarios, was published (FBC Website, Flood Management). The report analysed two coastal and two Fraser River flood scenarios through a joint probability approach and produced a map illustrating water levels at specific sites (Kerr Wood Leidal 2015). It illustrated the difference in water levels between the 1894 flood without consideration of SLR and a 1 in 500-year AEP⁷ flood combined with 1 m SLR. However, a large majority of protective works in place now were built through the Programme. As mentioned, these works mainly follow the standards set by BC Provincial Government in the 1970s based on the 1894 flood magnitude, plus a freeboard of 0.6 m in allowance for wave effect and uncertainties. Although there were upgrades in the following years, many are still below today's standards and their capability to resist major floods is highly questionable (The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia 2012; Northwest Hydraulic Consultants Ltd. 2016).

5. Analysis

Table 1 classifies the institutional responsibilities for climate adaptation management at each governance scale in Canada. The hierarchy confirms that, although being a public corporation, PMV largely lies outside the governmental structure for climate impact management. The next step was to collate evidence from the documentary and interview data against each of the framework factors (Table 2).

Table 1. Responsibility for climate adaption management at different institutional scales.

Hierarchy	Organisation(s)	Action(s)
National	Canadian Federal Government	Major capital investment in flood management works, but required local payment for rights of way and maintenance.
Provincial	BC Provincial Government	Major capital investment in flood management works, but required local payment for rights of way and maintenance. Conducted study and planning for dikes in the province. Funded the development of regional flood action plans.
Regional	Fraser Basin Council	Led “Lower mainland flood strategy” 2014.
Municipal	City of Vancouver	Led “Coastal flood risk project” 2012–2016.
		Recommended new Flood Construction Levels (FCLs)
Port authority	Port Metro Vancouver (PMV)	Participated in these two projects as a funding partner
Port terminals	Several private operators	No official contributions

Beginning with the first framework factor, the evidence in the table demonstrates that there is no clear system of integrating the port's climate adaptation management into a national or even a regional/local plan. There is currently no single organisation with responsibility for climate adaptation management (see also Table 1).

The unequal distribution of risks, benefits and costs is well-evidenced in the second row of the table. The Federal and BC Provincial Governments agree to offer funds for adaptation projects (e.g. dike upgrade) but subject to the municipal authority committing their own funds to the same projects, especially rights of ways and maintenance, which they frequently do not have⁸. Among the governmental agencies (including semi-governmental agencies), PMV is clearly the one that is the most incentivised to take the lead, due to its proximity to some highly vulnerable areas. However, insufficient knowledge and the lack of a dedicated team in place makes it very difficult to do so. This is not helped by the fact that such an intention attracts some unwanted, even unreasonable, pressure and expectation. One interviewee shared that:

during one FBC meeting, certain participants proposed that PMV should bear most of the financial and technical responsibilities for the dike improvements because PMV is likely the “main benefactor…. little they recognised that the much of the dike lies along coastlines that are out of PMV's jurisdictions”.

Moving on to the third factor of collective choice arrangements, PMV management has decided that the best strategy is to let other organisations, notably the (voluntary without real implementation power) FBC, take the lead. This is an indication that individual organisations become more self-protective and hope that others will take on the responsibility. Unsurprisingly, this leads to risk-averse behaviour and a scarcity of innovation from different stakeholders. The institutional structure may seem to have evolved towards regional collaboration, but the emotional competence of institutional actors may, in fact, move the informal institutions towards the opposite direction. The fact that no governmental agencies have clear responsibilities or action plans for adaptation generates a negative perception among participants: the lack of leadership, the lack of monitoring and the lack of urgency for real actions. Quoting one interviewee: “Many felt that the government was not sincere in helping normal people in solving day-to-day problems [caused by climate change]. Agencies from different hierarchies kicked the ball around and ‘the need for inputs from different parties’ was used as an excuse to not commit anything other than slogans”.

The fourth factor (monitoring) was little evidenced due to the lack of any formal measures or targets. Despite the availability of generally accepted scenarios, most interviewees agree that stakeholders still feel rather confused and unclear on the objectives to be reached and the actions to be undertaken. The higher level agencies overlook the unprecedented and uncertain nature of climate adaptation management. As agreed by various interviewees, such a policy creates an impasse for local authorities, including the City of Vancouver. It is because, in most cases, they do not possess better knowledge and resources. For example, as pointed out by several interviewees, PMV is experienced in mitigation but not adaptation and is yet to develop a climate adaptation plan. Hence, they find it difficult to convince other stakeholders, such as terminal operators, to contribute funds and efforts for such a purpose. One interviewee stated that: “the more the local officers tried to explain, the less the private stakeholders felt convinced”. Such confusion and misunderstandings make stakeholders even more hesitant to commit. Formal institutions focus on their traditional actions of studies and reports, but there is no monitoring or target system in place to force action.

The fifth factor is conflict avoidance and resolution. Inside PMV, the engineering team is in charge of adaptation efforts, mainly because one of their duties is to protect and maintain the infrastructure. However, engineers largely lack knowledge or expertise on the non-technical side of port planning. Indeed, it is a feature of a new process, such as climate adaptation, that many organisations do not have appropriately knowledgeable or experienced staff. During the collaborative meetings and seminars, involved partners (e.g. PMV) would send staff that they deem the most appropriate or relevant, but sometimes it would not be the same person attending each meeting. When the coordinating body (in this case, FBC) organises follow-up events and tries to define a clearer line of action, they fail to get access to the right person. From the views of many attendees, climate adaptation is a new component of their existing job descriptions. Considering its high level of uncertainty and long planning horizons, it is often a low priority compared to their daily duties. The informal nature of the collaborative network has limitations in achieving sustainable stakeholder engagement. The vague responsibility allocation offers reasons (or excuses) to stakeholders as rational actors to involve themselves in the climate adaptation management at a publically acceptable level for purposes of corporate social responsibility without any pressure to take real action. One interviewee shared that: “[These meetings] provide an opportunity for some participants, especially private ones, to be seen to be doing something in climate adaptation management without committing resources”. The FBC network is fragmented, and objectives and visions of the different stakeholders are not synthesised. Such a voluntary, network-based approach includes no mechanism to provide a resolution to the collective action problem.

The governance scale hierarchy in Table 1 shows that the current system is traditionally federalist but with aspects of emerging polycentrism (as recommended in framework factor six). Clear responsibilities are given for certain tasks (mostly traditional infrastructure maintenance) but it has proven impossible to allocate formal responsibility for this new challenge of climate adaptation; therefore the FBC has attempted to create an informal institution to take the lead. While FBC is a formal organisation, it does not have formal responsibility for climate adaptation processes (as no organisation has been given this responsibility), hence the network that it has established to move the matter forward is an informal institution, even though FBC itself is not. Yet it is risky to rely on informal institutions, as they do not have the same monitoring and accountability requirements, hence legitimacy, of formal governmental bodies with publicly mandated responsibilities and targets. Path-dependency on previous solutions precludes the search for a paradigm shift and focuses only on incremental improvements to existing (e.g. dike) settings, evidencing a lack of social learning beyond single loop, as discussed by Pahl-Wostl (2009). While attempts have been made to transform the governance structure due to the need for climate adaptation management (e.g. the initiative of the FBC), institutional actors remain largely indifferent. Sometimes, they even show their resistance to such development and become increasingly stubborn to protect the status quo and interests of the organisations to which they are affiliated. The challenges of establishing and maintaining successful polycentric governance (e.g. fragmentation of authority, expenditure of time and effort, transaction costs) highlighted by Koontz et al. (2015) are evident here, where responsibility has not been allocated to a single organisation. The fact that climate adaptation is a new challenge with no currently existing responsibility makes it easy for existing organisations to avoid taking it on.

It is clear from the preceding analysis that no robust and flexible process (factor seven) is currently in place to deal with climate adaptation at PMV. Despite the publication of the Coastal Flood Risk Assessment Final Report in 2014 by the City of Vancouver, no private stakeholders have officially made any financial commitments. Many stakeholders are not willing to get actively involved in funding and implementation, but blame the lack of clear responsibilities for action within the institutional system as the core reason, where it is easy to identify a classic collective action problem. Quoting one interviewee from the private sector:

The government never provides convincing arguments…we are profit-making organisations and why should we commit when the [short term] benefits are not explicit?…it is not fair for private firms to commit when the government is not setting a good exemplar itself.

The final element of the theoretical framework is policy learning. After years of looking into the issue, the City of Vancouver still focuses on assessing flood risk assessment, prioritisation of high-risk areas and tries to improve regional collaboration (via FBC) with other (private) stakeholders. While this reflects Canada's traditional bottom-up planning approach, it also illustrates the desire of the higher-level agencies to construct a certain public image: that it cares about climate adaptation (local needs) but without the need to reform the established infrastructure funding system. This coheres with the findings of Zhang and Ng (2016) where any attempt to preserve the status quo in climate adaptation management leads to half-hearted commitments. Therefore, rather than policy learning, in this case there is some evidence that the inability of current institutions to evolve with the newly emerging challenge of climate adaptation is actually eroding the effectiveness of the current governance arrangement.

6. Conclusion

6.1. Emerging polycentricity is impeded by traditional federal governance models

The institutional analysis of the PMV case revealed many of the familiar challenges from the literature reviewed in Section 2, including path dependence on traditional approaches, formal governance structures unable to adapt to new challenges, particularly in this case to allocate responsibility for an emerging challenge, and the growth of informal governance as an attempt to fill the gap. A classic collective action problem has arisen due to the unequal distribution of costs and benefits and the free rider problem. No clear formal chain of responsibility is in place and local authorities need to commit their own resources before they can access national funds, thus producing a stalemate. A lack of clear public sector agency is evident, with a non-governmental organisation forced to take the lead (i.e. FBC) by attempting to establish an informal institutional structure.

We therefore find that a nested polycentric governance form with clearly demarcated responsibilities between scales (as recommended by Huntjens et al. 2012) has not been able to develop successfully. Its emergence has been impeded by the traditional federalist model (local/regional/national transport planning structure) with a closed pool of stakeholders, unable to adapt to a truly polycentric model with adaptable boundaries. This traditional model has been effective for traditional infrastructure investments, but has proved ineffective in allocating responsibility for a newly emerging challenge due to the path dependency of fixed formal structures, and is therefore not ideal for the port sector.

The modern port sector requires a more polycentric governance model, because ports are individual entities competing with other ports within the same region and/or country (see Section 6.3), thus lying outside the traditional vertical federal governance model. For example, regional and national actors are part of the pool of stakeholders for several competing ports, and indeed the port terminal operators are part of other non-local (indeed multi-national) stakeholder groups (Pinkse and Kolk 2012). As discussed in the large port governance literature, port terminals are embedded in multinational chains of governance through international ownership and the provision of their services to global shipping lines with their own imperatives related to service quality, cost and the impact of charges or regulations derived from climate adaptation strategies that might be imposed by the port. In the port sector there exist, therefore, both horizontal (coordination across multiple formal and informal stakeholders involved in this sector) and vertical (coordination between different scales of governance from local to regional to national and international) policy integration challenges (Dovers and Hezri 2010). Multiple scales of embeddedness both horizontally and vertically produce a collective action problem with no mechanism for resolution.

6.2. Relying on informal institutions can lead to institutional erosion

Slow to change and conservative, formal institutions are often perceived as barriers to climate adaptation; for example, Root, van der Krabben, and Spit (2015) demonstrated how informal institutions have emerged as mechanisms to navigate and avoid such barriers. Yet it is important to remember that, while it is attractive and often necessary to seek to escape the limitations of formal institutions, such informal network approaches are difficult to construct (Termeer 2009). The very nature of these informal institutions means that they are unpredictable and uncontrollable, their legitimacy and agency can rise and fall depending on circumstances. Previous research has focused on successful informal institutions, but our findings show that it can be risky to rely on them because if they are unsuccessful then there is little recourse. Moreover, the outcome may be worse than the original situation because, judging by the negative comments made by several interviewees as a result of the impasse, the informal capital is used up and there is now even less motivation to achieve change. As noted by Wittneben et al. (2012), climate adaptation management cannot just be treated as a corporate social responsibility issue. It requires transformative changes within and between institutions. This finding creates an interesting hypothesis for future research. An unprecedented problem (e.g. requirement to adapt to climate change) involving multiple stakeholders from different scales can be difficult to address through existing formal institutions. Informal institutions are thus sought as an alternative, but, after a time of frustration and lack of agreement, an unsuccessful informal arrangement can initiate the erosion of established institutional systems.

As argued by Hoffman (2015), the perception of individuals on climate change (and its impacts) is largely emotionally constructed, and substantial uncertainty means that institutional actors need to solve an ambiguous problem with little support from regulations, past experiences or established practices. Once institutional actors fail to resolve this conflict, emotional competence turns the institutional system into a vicious cycle where members are determined to preserve the established system and their interests, hence making the situation deteriorate. Slawinsky et al. (2015) note that uncertainty over future regulation reinforces market logic to postpone large investments for uncertain results. Rather than prompting a paradigm shift in institutional change, ineffective climate adaptation management may erode the institutional system and actually go backwards, becoming more conservative. We propose the concept of institutional erosion to capture the finding that the failure of informal institutions can actually weaken the formal institutional setting. This links with the work of Fuenfschilling and Truffer (2016) discussed earlier, who suggested that informal institutions need further institutionalisation to trigger a change in established structures. In this case, new normative associations were insufficiently embedded in new routines thus the informal institution could not be fully established, ultimately depleting institutional capital.

Future research is needed to explore this phenomenon and classify its features. It could be characterised as a negative instance of institutional plasticity (Strambach 2010; Notteboom, de Langen, and Jacobs 2013), where institutional capacity stretches and transforms without a change in the formal structure, yet the concept is generally treated as a positive evolution rather than a negative development, as in this case. We have selected the term ‘erosion’ rather than ‘regression’ which suggests a gradual weakening but not yet an actual change. The next research question may be: how do failed informal institutions lead to (potentially negative) modifications of formal institutions?

6.3. Policy recommendations and future research

Climate change is a market failure issue, in which market forces do not incentivise action due to uncertainty and difficult to measure effects. Most ports are still at the embryonic stage of knowledge of climate adaptation and find it challenging to proceed to the implementation of adaptation strategies. As the port authority of the largest port in Canada, PMV are pioneers in mitigation but have not considered the criticality of adaptation until recently. Inexperienced in adaptation, it currently focuses on joining other projects, rather than leading, and has not yet developed its own adaptation plan. It therefore shares certain commonalities with other ports that have undergone climate adaptation planning: even with a better understanding of adaptation conditions, the involved stakeholders find it difficult to proceed to the next level in terms of planning, funding, and implementation (Messner, Becker, and Ng 2016). The case analysis here revealed that this difficulty to proceed to the next level was due, despite attempts to include multiple stakeholders, to a lack of social learning (cf. Pahl-Wostl 2009) and steering culture (Hrelja 2015), thus a failure to build a new vision, leading ultimately to an inability to embed a new normative association and thus fully establish and maintain the new institutional structure (cf. Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2016).

As a public corporation but also an independent business outside official governmental structures, PMV has to develop its own course of action, thus strategic national infrastructure (in this case, the country's largest port) is not incorporated in national planning for climate change adaptation, which seems a significant risk to the national economy. Climate adaptation for ports is thus different to other transport infrastructure because each port is individually owned and operated and competing against other ports, so it is challenging for the regional or national government to make a system-wide approach and decide on investments for each one. Therefore, the findings here are more applicable to this type of competitive industry, rather than, e.g. a nationally managed road infrastructure network. Thus these findings can be generalised to other similar industries where individual firms (whether public or private) compete in an open market that is nonetheless of strategic national importance (Inderberg 2011), such as energy production or telecommunications which are privatised in many countries. In all of these industries, the particular asset or infrastructure is both subject to national infrastructure plans and legislation, but in most aspects governed as an independent business operating in an open market.

One way forward could be to establish a neutral agency capable of making decisions and taking responsive action, able to impose order from a polycentric perspective rather than the current approach whereby emerging polycentricism is impeded by the path dependence of the federalist structure. In the Strategy, working as project manager and facilitator of communication, FBC has no power over any of the stakeholders to direct progress. In most adaptation cases, the status quo is that stakeholders get together, share knowledge, and then continue business as usual. In contrast to the existing voluntary network, any new network organisation should not only synthesise stakeholder views in a coherent vision, but also have the authority to progress adaptation processes through concrete actions. Through this agency, representatives could coordinate, discuss conflicts of interest, mobilise resources, and work towards a mutually acceptable decision to make real progress, moving from a sectoral approach towards a ‘mainstreaming’ approach (Uittenbroek, Janssen-Jansen, and Runhaar 2013).

Yet obtaining any real power for this agency would remain difficult, as institutions are always incomplete, being contested, and shaped by interested actors with unequal power relations. The institutional setup for climate adaptation in Canada is still being produced as various stakeholders jockey for position, seeking influence and power to achieve their goals without committing too many resources. As climate adaptation management remains novel and poorly understood, there is as yet no consensus on the most effective institutional structure for planning and funding organisations, and developing such a model requires a long time frame to embed participatory processes in the emerging institutional framework (Van der Voorn, Pahl-Wostl, and Quist 2012; Van der Voorn et al. 2017).

While this paper focused on the institutional level, further research should be undertaken at firm and particularly at industry level to understand and compare what is happening across the port sector in different countries. Given that the unequal distribution of costs and benefits was the key source of the collective action problem (as it is in many institutional analyses), the creation of a mechanism to manage this seems key. Therefore, an important avenue for future research could be to develop a potential allocation method for the necessary costs. A potential allocation method of usage may be implemented at both port and regional levels. The port users on a unit basis will incur an expected cost of hazard event. The unit basis indicates that the more a user operates (and generates revenue), the more cost would be caused by climate change impacts. If a port authority makes adaptation investments at a certain chance (which needs to be further determined), this unit cost will be reduced. Investment responsibility can be allocated based on the expected benefit gained by each stakeholder from port-related activities. Of course, more elements should be considered to make it feasible, including how to identify the scope of stakeholders, how to evaluate the different effects of an adaptation investment on the unit costs of different stakeholders, how to implement it in the real business environment, and how it would influence port competitiveness. This analysis would be the first task of any new organisation to secure legitimacy for any future actions and investments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The study is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Grant Council of Canada (SSHRC) through its Insight Grants program [project number 47360], [sponsor award number 435-2017-0735]; and the University of Manitoba Transport Institute (UMTI).

Notes

1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) defines adaptation as “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities”.

2. PMV is the port authority of the port of Vancouver. Starting from 6 April 2016, PMV has been renamed ‘Port of Vancouver’ (POV).

3. The identities of the interviewees are not released here due to confidentiality agreements between them and the authors.

4. Spring freshets are a result of “large spring snowpack with an extended period of hot weather” and “large spring snowpack with wide spread heavy rainfall” (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations 2014a, 12).

5. See Ng and Pallis (2010) for further explanation of landlord ports.

6. The peak flows at Hope (the very upstream part) are used by the BC Provincial Government to measure the water level of the Fraser River and develop flooding scenarios.

7. Annual Exceedance Probabilities (AEP) is the chance of a flooding event occurring annually. For example, if a flood has an AEP of 2%, then a flood of this magnitude is expected to take place once in 50 years (in other words, it has a return period of 50 years).

8. For example, the estimated cost of dike improvement along 250 km of coastline along the City of Vancouver would cost around CAD 9.5 billion (CBC 2012).