The Governance of Climate Change Adaptation in 10 OECD Countries: Challenges and Approaches

Abstract

Although the public governance of climate change adaptation gained increasing attention among both policy-makers and researchers in recent years, it is still largely unclear how governments aim to develop and implement adaptation policies. This paper takes stock of respective institutional innovations at the national level in 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. It first introduces four challenges that are key in the context of climate adaptation policy-making, that is, (i) how to better integrate adaptation policies horizontally across policy sectors and (ii) vertically across jurisdictional levels, (iii) how to integrate knowledge, and (iv) how to involve non-state stakeholders in adaptation policy-making. Based on a desk research and semi-structured interviews, this paper then highlights a variety of institutional innovations (here referred to as governance approaches) that the selected governments employ to address these four challenges. Overall, it is shown that most of these approaches are restricted to soft, voluntary ways of coordination and steering that often address more than one of the four challenges at a time and that national adaptation strategies usually mark the centrepiece of adaptation governance around which other governance approaches emerge.

Keywords:

• adaptation to climate change
• adaptation policies
• adaptation governance
• horizontal integration
• vertical integration
• adaptation mainstreaming
• knowledge integration
• participation

Acknowledgements

We thank the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP) for funding the Go-Adapt project (Project No. K09AC0K00032) and two anonymous reviewers from JEPP for their constructive comments that helped us to improve the paper.

Notes

Of the 34 OECD countries, the 19 countries we screened were those that had visible and easily accessible adaptation governance approaches in place when we started the survey in April 2010. The countries excluded after the screening were the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and the USA, either because they appeared to be less active than those included in the sample or because their activities were not documented in English.

Ian Burton (University of Toronto), Jouni Paavola (University of Leeds), Andrea Prutsch, and Maria Balas (Austrian Environment Agency).

None of the interviewees suggested that the approaches we discussed address additional governance challenges.