Resilience to wad? Exploring different perceptions of resilience and coastal protection measures among key stakeholders at the German Wadden Sea

Climate change is challenging coastal resilience worldwide, with hard engineering coastal protection measures reaching their limits and becoming increasingly unsustainable. The Wadden Sea, a UNESCO World Heritage natural site, illustrates this dilemma, hemmed in between a rigid dike line and an encroaching North Sea. While the term resilience gains traction in both policy and academia, its meaning remains contested: Is the goal to keep the shoreline unchanged, safeguard communities, protect ecosystems or something else? To clarify what Resilience to Wad could look like, we examine how key actors along the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea perceive coastal resilience and which coastal protection measures they favour. Semi-structured interviews, observations, and policy document analysis were used to understand these perceptions and key influencing factors. Findings reveal that stakeholders tend to favour conventional hard engineering solutions to coastal management due to entrenched path dependencies and strong place attachment. Yet where those lock-ins are weaker and cultural landscapes align more with the tidal flats, a shift in coastal management is evident. Institutions continue to prioritise people and material assets while treating the ecosystem as separate from the social fabric. Broadening the political agenda to embrace social-ecological interdependence is therefore pivotal for negotiating a shared, stakeholder-driven vision of a climate-resilient Wadden Sea. Collectively, our study advances the literature by (1) introducing the Coastal Resilience Bloom linking perceptions and practice, (2) evidencing an emerging - albeit uneven and place-specific - resilience turn, and (3) showing how policy framing and path dependencies shape acceptance of more innovative coastal protection measures.