Resilience Thinking in Spatial Planning: Challenges and Opportunities for Climate Change Adaptation

Resilience thinking, emphasising adaptability and transformability, provides a systems-based framework for fostering flexibility, participatory processes, and long-term sustainability in spatial planning. While extensively studied in urban contexts, its application in rural areas and small municipalities remains underexplored. This debate article examines the potentials and challenges of integrating resilience thinking into climate change adaptation strategies in rural spatial planning, with a focus on Lower Austria as a case study. By analysing resilience capacities — absorptive, adaptive, and transformative — at the municipal level, we find that current efforts are predominantly short-term and reactive, such as flood protection measures, with limited systemic integration into planning processes. Fragmented climate change adaptation efforts, coupled with governance constraints like insufficient expertise and financial resources, further impede the development of long-term resilience. The article underscores the need for a multi-level approach that bridges local knowledge with broader planning frameworks to foster transformative resilience in rural areas, calling for further research to address these gaps.