Knowledge for local climate change adaptation in Sweden: challenges of multilevel governance

Abstract

Adaptation to climate change is often perceived as a local concern; yet local stakeholders are influenced by knowledge and politics from international and national contexts. Based on a review of Swedish climate change adaptation policy and interviews and focus groups in the Stockholm region, this paper discusses how knowledge relevant to climate change adaptation has been institutionalised in Sweden and how this may affect the potential for learning. The results indicate that the institutionalising of knowledge and knowledge exchange has been weak, especially compared to the implementation of Local Agenda 21, which also calls for action at the local level. So far, Swedish adaptation policy has relied mainly on soft governance tools. Further, we conclude that there is need for improved mechanisms for feedback from the local to the national level in this rapidly evolving policy field.

Keywords:

• climate change adaptation
• climate policy
• Local Agenda 21
• knowledge
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the generous financial support from the Swedish Research Council for the postdoc project Social learning in cross-level environmental governance (contract 435-2008-541) and from Mistra for the Stockholm study undertaken within the Mistra-SWECIA programme. We also want to thank Louise Simonsson, Swedish Defence Research Agency and Karin André, CSPR, Linköping University, for their contributions to the empirical study; Maja Dahlin, Stockholm Environment Institute for technical assistance, and Tom Gill, Stockholm Environment Institute, for language editing.