Institutional foundations of adaptive planning: exploration of flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA

ABSTRACT

Given the risk posed by escalating climate conditions, there is a need to assess how localities integrate adaptive planning into hazard mitigation and how this is enabled or constrained by existing planning institutions. We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States – a largely underresourced and highly socioeconomically vulnerable area. Using Natural Language Processing to analyze county and regional hazard plans as well as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings, we find that adaptive planning is largely absent in the study area. Like many localities in the U.S., the communities in the study area have approached flood planning in static terms that do not fully consider future uncertainties; failed to engage diverse participation in planning; and neglected to pursue co-benefits possible with flood mitigation and other sectors. Critically, this may be a product of traditional planning institutions as well as limited local capacities.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive planning
• uncertainty
• flood plan
• Rio grande valley

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Laura Button for her contribution to this paper through the National Science Foundation's Ocean and Coastal Research Experiences for Undergraduates (OCEANUS) program at Texas A&M University at Galveston during the summer 2022.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2023.2180249.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data is available from DesignSafe-CI: https://doi.org/10.17603/ds2-5x0c-2v08 v1

Notes

1. See Appendix A for list of words removed from the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under a Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant (SCC-PG), grant number NSF 21-535.

Notes on contributors

Ashley D. Ross

Ashley D. Ross is an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston in the Department of Marine and Coastal Environmental Science. Her research interests include community disaster resilience, hazards governance, and coastal community resilience.

Ali Nejat

Ali Nejat is an Associate Professor of Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University. His research interests include modeling the dynamics of post-disaster housing and household recovery, infrastructure management, and system dynamics.

Virgie Greb

Virgie Greb is a doctoral student in the Marine and Coastal Management and Science program at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Her research interests include social-ecological resilience and hazards management.