Climate change adaptation in Denmark: enhancement through collaboration and meta-governance?

Abstract

This article investigates how Danish municipalities adapt to climate change and how added value can be achieved by a change of governance modes. The article is based on a quantitative survey, a qualitative analysis of 10 municipal climate change adaptation strategies, and interviews with planners from five municipalities. The study shows that adaptation is rather narrowly defined to mainly be about water management and that adaptation planning and implementation takes place in technical departments in the municipalities. Cross-sector collaboration is limited, and so is the involvement of citizens and external resources.

This articles argues that increased collaboration and meta-governance is called for to aid the municipalities in their efforts and open collaboration venues with, for example, professionals from other sectors, researchers, citizens, and companies whose resources have not yet been fully involved, and to stimulate inter-municipal and cross-sectoral collaboration in order to produce adaptation measures with added value.

Keywords:

• climate change adaptation
• local government
• network governance
• collaboration
• meta-governance

Notes

Due to the variety of answer options in the questionnaire we aggregated them in three groups: “Yes”, “No” and “Other”. The Yes category consists of the following answer options: Yes; to a great extent; to some extent; and to a lesser extent (as a reply to questions like "To what degree…”. The No category include: No; and no, but plan to do and finally the answer option not at all. The last category Other include the following answer options: Do not know; not answered; not relevant; other.