Perspectives of the Expert and Experienced on Challenges to Regional Adaptation for Sea Level Rise: Implications for Multisectoral Readiness and Boundary Spanning

Abstract

This study focuses on adaptation to sea level rise (SLR) in the specific context of the Hampton Roads region of southeastern coastal Virginia. It analyzes the perspectives of stakeholders who are experts in and have experience with SLR to develop an informed understanding of the region’s ability to address SLR and its readiness to pursue adaptation using a whole-of-community approach. A survey of the expert and experienced reveals (1) what they prioritized as the top three most challenging phases of regional adaptation and (2) what issues within those priority areas were the most pressing. Our findings point to the importance of meso- and micro-level boundary spanning across organizations and the whole of the community to ensure that multiple organizations and individuals in a region can be engaged in adaptation. Finally, this work briefly discusses how boundary-spanning approaches can provide a region a pathway toward overcoming barriers to effective climate-related adaptation.

Keywords:

• Adaptation
• boundary organizations
• boundary spanning
• regional adaptation
• multisectoral
• sea level rise
• whole-of-community

Notes

1 Experts, according to Mozumder et al. (2011), are characterized as actors normally within institutional settings — government, non-profit, business — who customarily have some decision-making role involving the management of sea-level rise. For our study we also included residents as experts to account for their knowledge of, and personal experiences with, flooding and adaptation to SLR. Additionally, for the purposes of this study, our focus is on both expertise and experience, so we apply an additional criterion that respondents must have dealt with the issue of SLR for at least 3 years. We consider the expert and experienced as one multisectoral group of actors and treat them as such in our study.

2 The research protocol was reviewed and approved as human subjects exempt research by the institution’s College Committee.

3 This Supplemental Information, Table S1: Diagnostic Questions by the Stage in the Adaptation Process and the Adaptation System Components, is available here: http://www.pnas.org/highwire/filestream/604676/field_highwire_adjunct_files/0/st01.doc

4 While we acknowledge that there are limitations to the use of purposive sample strategies such as snowball sampling, this approach was the most appropriate given our focus on a multisectoral group of experts and opinion leaders.