Improving the adaptive capacity of NSW land use planning

Australian communities are increasingly threatened by climate change. Land use planning as a system that anticipates and manages local spatial change is widely recognised as a climate adaptation solution. Climate problems will affect whole communities so effective adaptive responses will require planning that is both spatial and social in scope. The planning system of NSW is used as a case study to establish how the planning system can guide local community adaptation. The problem of increasing local adaptive capacity draws in theories of planning, organisational learning, systems, adaptation, and adaptive and anticipatory governance. The emergent conceptual solution is a planning institution that enables recursive and adaptive learning. Transformative change is required to make the NSW planning system adaptive. Transformative changes would restructure planning as a self-learning system at all administrative levels which raises practical administration and maladaptation issues. Rather than focus adaptive change on land use planning, an optimal solution may be that NSW as an administrative and institutional system becomes an adaptation pathway.