“Sometimes Climate Adaptation is Politically Correct”: A Case Study of Planners and Politicians Negotiating Climate Adaptation in Waterfront Spatial Planning

Abstract

Today, spatial planning is expected to deliver climate adaptation and to manage, merge and balance various societal interests and priorities. To what extent proactive shaping of change is enabled by spatial planning practice is less explored. This paper illustrates how the ideals and ambitions of climate adaptation are manifested in waterfront spatial planning via a case study of Norrköping, Sweden. Based on interviews with spatial planners and politicians responsible for strategic urban development planning, our study identifies a divergence in ambitions, approaches and positions. In local development plans, the position taken has less to do with climate risk severity than with an area's perceived political and economic attractiveness. When perceived attractiveness is low, precautionary climate adaptation serves as a pretext not to develop, whereas high perceived attractiveness leads to negotiated pragmatism allowing continued waterfront exploitation. We also identify a fragmentation in spatial planning, with weak interplay between municipal comprehensive planning and local development plans, resulting in ad hoc, case-by-case planning. Furthermore, different planning actors are organizationally compartmentalized, creating unfortunate intra-sectoral silos. We conclude that the integrative, proactive and reflexive potentials of spatial planning to deliver climate adaptation have yet to be realized.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the interviewees for generously sharing their views, perspectives and experiences of climate adaptation and spatial planning practices. The research was generously funded by the Centre for Municipality Studies (CKS) and has been published as part of the research project “Risk, vulnerability and adaptation to climate variations and change in Östergötland”.