Policy design, spatial planning and climate change adaptation: a case study from Australia

Abstract

There are gaps in the existing climate change adaptation literature concerning the design of spatial planning instruments and the relationship between policy instruments and the sociopolitical barriers to adaptation reform. To help address this gap, this article presents a typology of spatial planning instruments for adaptation and analyses the pattern of instrument choice in Australian planning processes in order to shed light on contextual factors that can impede adaptation. The analysis highlights how policy design can amplify the barriers to adaptation by arranging policy actors in ways inimical to reform and stripping decision makers of the instruments necessary to make and sustain desired policy changes.

Keywords:

• climate change adaptation
• spatial planning
• policy design
• barriers to adaptation

Acknowledgements

This work was carried out with financial support from the Australian Government (Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. The views expressed herein are those of the authors.

Notes

1. Although spatial planning and policy design are separate fields, they share much in common at the theoretical level (Taylor 1998; Lane 2005; Hall and Tewdwr-Jones 2011; Howlett and Lejano 2013). Both have a rational, functionalist heritage that has been largely abandoned in their contemporary forms. Just as modern models of spatial planning assume political pluralism and accept that planning involves a combination of the technical and political, policy design posits that design choices are contextual. Hence, while contemporary normative policy design strives for improved rationality, it is a procedural aspirational goal (consideration of options and implications) rather than a substantive, technocratic perception of an optimal design form. Consistent with this, it is acknowledged that neither policy formulation nor implementation will necessarily fit the envisaged idealised forms and that policy design is contested (May 2003; Bobrow 2006).

2. Nodality refers to governments’ strategic position in information networks, which gives them an enhanced capacity to dispense and gather information.

3. Authority refers to legal power or authority to control behaviour and adjudicate disputes.

4. Treasure refers to governments’ capacity to both raise and expend financial resources.

5. Organisation refers to governments’ internal stock of human and human made capital and how it is arranged.

6. We define the phrase “policy style” in this context as the combination of how spatial planning issues are framed and the strategies and instruments that are used to solve them, how relevant networks are managed, and the operating procedures for implementing chosen procedural and substantive instruments, as well as the preferences of policy elites on the same (Freeman 1985, Knodt 1997, Howlett 2000b, 2009).