Local pathways of climate change adaptation: Discourses, actors and tools

Climate change adaptation has become a crucial response to our changing climate as it contributes to coping with actual or expected adverse effects of climate change by making adjustments to ecological, social, or economic systems (IPCC, 2022a: 2898). Especially after the Paris Agreement, and even more in the light of the 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IPCC, 2022b), climate change adaptation has gained political attention. Nowadays, we witness an outpouring of studies and policy documents that emphasize the relevance of developing and implementing adaptation measures to properly address climate change challenges. This Special Issue aims to contribute to advancing knowledge about this relevant response to climate change by documenting how concepts, logics, and approaches influence the shaping of local adaptation governance. Both international and national policy decisions and local adaptation processes rely on formal authoritative procedures (that end up as formal decisions and actual practices), creating a fairly direct documentation of these concepts, logics, and approaches, readily available for analytical inquiries. The findings provided in this Special Issue reveal local pathways for climate change adaptation, highlighting the political processes that support how local communities address climate change impacts. These processes include identifying and understanding climate risks, implementing medium- and long-term strategies, and utilizing procedures, digital solutions, regulations, and urban plans to adapt to climate change consequences effectively at the local level. Local pathways do not develop in a vacuum but rely on formal top-down procedures and laws, through which international and national policies trickle down to the local level of governance (Rhinard et al., 2024). Climate risk perception and awareness at local levels play an important role in how risks are identified, as they do in contestation and divergence related to decision-making priorities. Climate variability, and the uncertainties affiliated with knowledge about such variability, tend to influence the framing of decisions, and thus their implementation. The characteristics of the risks, and the degree to which they are perceived as uncertain, complex, or ambiguous, can suggest the type of actors involved in these processes and how they frame risks and through which tools. For instance, adaptation measures may be proactive (to be expected if we see local decisions as expressions of international developments in a top-down perspective), or they may be more bottom-up oriented, where decisions stem from pressures that are primarily reactive. Thus, local solutions may not always follow national (or international) priorities and strategies. The interpretation of such processes and end-products allows considerable interpretive leeway at the local level, through a bottom-up approach, due to socioeconomic contextual factors. These processes call for case-based studies and engagement with public officials. Both have been the backbone of the research project RISKSEC. 2.0 Local climate change adaptation: from risk governance to securitization strategies?, which has analyzed processes of climate change adaptation at international, national and local level. The project assumed that several climate change policies that advocate for climate change adaptation are typical top-down, as, for instance, those promoted by the United Nations and the European Union. However, climate change impacts manifest locally, and adaptation measures and actions need to be taken at the local level to bring benefits to local communities. Without a proper understanding of the characteristics of local governance, climate change adaptation is doomed to fail, with consequent economic, environmental, and human costs. In addition, these policies are framed through securitization discourses on climate change, which raise the following questions addressed in this Special Issue: since climate change has been subject to securitization processes, has climate change adaptation been securitized as well? If so, which type of securitization is observed: threat- or risk-oriented? All the contributions in this Special Issue rely on the literature on the securitization of climate change (Boas, 2015, Diez et al., 2016, von Lucke et al., 2014). In its classic academic formulation, securitization was defined as the process by which elites transform issues into matters of security by labeling them as existential threats that require extraordinary responses (Buzan et al., 1998). It is an extreme form of politicization—one that legitimizes certain arguments, practices, and methods to be used in the name of security. The classic approach was rather narrow, requiring extraordinary ‘existential’ speech acts that we rarely see today. Recent scholars argue that securitization is not always so obvious. Securitization may take place even without using security language (Bigo, 2002). It might involve appeals to urgency, claims of impending danger, the use of certain technology, the entry of new actors, or calls for special resources. This version of securitization is more subtle but equally consequential: certain discourses are enabled, relationships forged, tools built, and goals outlined. In climate change adaptation, all this can affect decision making on adaptation and lead to transformational changes in local communities, which are not necessarily the most suitable for them. This subtler version of securitization is reflected in the literature on riskification (Diez et al., 2016, Odeyemi, 2021). Riskification is more relevant today, some authors argue (Corry, 2012), since it reflects the more everyday—even mundane—turns of phrase and guiding mindsets that shift policy outcomes. Rather than the utterance of an existential threat, riskification frames issues more broadly, as possible and random sources of harm that must be addressed. It assigns probabilities to known dangers and brings a mindset of bringing hazards “under control,” often through technocratic processes. To analyze local climate change adaptation within this literature, the contributions in this Special Issue have used a common analytical framework elaborated by the project, operationalised in discourses, actors and tools to allow comparative reflections about the local cases presented in each contribution. The local cases concern four municipalities located in different European countries: Dordrecht Municipality in the Netherlands, Halmstad Municipality in Sweden, and the Municipalities of Stavanger and Bergen in Norway. Despite different socio-political contexts, these four municipalities share a common challenge derived from climate change: risks stemming from water-related hazards, such as precipitation-induced landslides, floods, and sea level rise. While the local studies shed light on local features of climate change adaptation responses and the contextual factors driving these responses, the analysis presented in the last paper carries out a cross-case comparison highlight similarities and differences across the cases. The first paper of this Special Issue, titled Securitization of local adaptation: Signs of riskification in a Dutch region, by Nenya Jochemsen and Heleen Mees, investigates to what extent climate change adaptation has been securitized in a Dutch region considered a frontrunner in adaptation—the safety region South Holland South—where the municipality of Dordrecht is susceptible to flooding from the rivers and the sea in case of high-water levels due to its geographical position (Jochemsen & Mees, 2024). The impacts in case of a flood event are considered from severe to catastrophic in terms of casualties, costs, and societal disruption. The analytical framework on discourses, actors, and tools employed in the local adaptation governance uncovers clear signs of riskification, such as the use of risk terminology and the involvement of risk and safety actors. New risk tools, like risk and vulnerability analyses, sustain the adaptation work. In the Dutch case, climate change adaptation is dealt with as a shared responsibility and as a cross-sectoral policy to be integrated and mainstreamed to become the “new normal.” The second paper, Climate adaptation in multi-level governance systems: Security, risk, or normal politics?, by Karina Barquet, Mathilda Englund, and Mark Rhinard, aims to track securitization discourses and practices across governance levels in Sweden, using the Municipality of Halmstad as a case study (Barquet, Englund, et al., 2024). While the paper finds some threat- and risk-oriented securitization, most discourses, and practices align with normal politics—a trend shaped by organizational fragmentation, limited resources, and the normative power of experts. However, distinct variations exist across governance levels and sectors as climate change adaptation is approached by centralized policymaking and regulation, whereas responsibilities and implementation are decentralized and fragmented. This setup allows discourses and practices to move along multiple pathways, where they trickle down from the top, emerge from local interpretations and priorities, and diffuse through expert and scientific knowledge. The third paper, by Claudia Morsut, Ole Andreas Engen, Simon Neby, and Elisabeth Angell, is titled Translations of climate change consequences at the local level: Climate change adaptation in Bergen and Stavanger municipalities in Norway (Morsut et al., 2024). Both municipalities are located in the southwestern part of Norway and are prone to various water-related hazards such as (fluvial) flooding, rapid and intense rainfall, and sea levels rising. The municipalities promote several plans that address how to work with and facilitate climate change adaptation. In this paper, the authors analyze how the two municipalities respond to climate risks via adaptation measures and initiatives, aiming to understand how climate adaptation challenges are translated into local settings and shaped by context-specific discourses. The study shows that the discourses of local adaptation in the negotiations about meanings concerning security, threat, and risk performed by local public officials in the two cities are fairly similar, but also that variation in governance structures and processes contributes to varying translation pathways: although comparable risk discourses occur in both cases, translation zones and actor constellations differ—accentuating the local nature of climate adaptation, despite practices and discourses being developed within the same national framework, for comparable climate impacts. The Special Issue concludes with cross-case comparison paper authored by all authors contributing to this Special Issue (Barquet, Morsut, et al., 2024), which explores framings of climate change adaptation pathways. Variations of Riskification: Climate change adaptation in four European cities sustains the assumption that in the four municipalities climate change adaptation is mainly riskified. The paper analyses the extent of riskification in each case, compares it, and finds out the reasons behind variations of riskification. Variation in riskification across the cases is explained by three dynamics—risk memory, risk culture, and technocratic governance. With this Special Issue, the authors have aimed to shed light on the way securitization affects local-level governance of adaptation, which is much less known than the securitization of climate change at national and international levels, by pinpointing positive (shared understandings and coherent action) and negative (conflicting perspectives and local disempowerment) dynamics. The authors believe that knowledge-based policy decisions inform more effective local adaptation and offer a nuanced picture of what kinds of transformational changes in climate change adaptation are most suitable for local communities.