Climate-proofing coastal cities is an important part of the current policy agenda for climate adaptation, particularly in a situation where waterfront redevelopment is accelerating. Cities call for ...innovative approaches integrating climate protection with urban attractiveness and waterfront endeavors. There is a lack of studies targeting policy processes for coastal protection, including the choice of adaptation strategies and impediments for implementation. Sweden is an interesting case due to the decentralized character of coastal adaptation. Consequently, this paper aims to analyze the status of and conditions for large-scale multifunctional coastal protection by means of qualitative analyses of policy documents and interviews with frontline practitioners in four Swedish coastal cities: Malmö, Gothenburg, Helsingborg and Landskrona. The analysis documents a predominant focus on envisioning/planning for coastal protection rather than implementation of adaptation measures. While waterfront development functions as a window of opportunity in the more populous cities it also risks creating fragmentation and social imbalances in coastal protection between cities and their various coastal areas. Key implementation determinants emphasize formal institutional aspects, where politics and political decision-making need to set the necessary terms ensuring implementation. Current public-private and national-local distribution of responsibilities, stepwise planning and limited funding-mechanisms create uncertainties in system robustness and coherency. The consequences of a system for coastal protection heavily reliant on decentralized action needs to be properly considered by adaptation policy-makers.
•Research on planning and implementation of coastal climate adaptation is important.•Cities' envisioning and planning for coastal protection dominates over implementation.•Waterfront redevelopment as a window of opportunity challenges system robustness.•Planning involves a puzzle of coastal protection strategies and measures.•Critical determinants influencing implementation vary with municipal size.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
While climate adaptation planning and implementation is gradually increasing across the globe, there is a documented gap between what is done and what needs to be done. Researchers have documented ...climate adaptation efforts at the strategic policy-making level and in urban planning practices, but less is known about how cities navigate the intricacies of climate adaptation policy-progression in the existing built environment. Contributing to the analytical unpacking of how to reduce policy implementation gaps, this paper targets ten Swedish early adopter cities seeking to proactively and pragmatically progress with their climate adaptation efforts from policy-formation to implementation in the urban built environment. Qualitative analyses of interviews and policy-documents illustrate that the cities, despite their early adopter status, struggle with stepwise policy-progression and get stuck when approaching implementation. Ensuring appropriate climate adaptation in the existing urban built environment becomes problematic due to current legal distribution of responsibilities, diverse land-ownership patterns and path-dependent structures and configurations within cities that are dense, intricate and tightly developed over of time. We identify three pragmatic action-strategies adopted to create solution space and allowing the cities to proceed: event-driven, target-driven and opportunity-driven climate adaptation, each having their advantages and disadvantages for ensuring urban robustness, as well as different requirements for up-scaling. The analysis enables important lessons of climate adaptation policy-progression, the promise and pitfalls of stepwise adaptation and the necessity of pragmatic muddling that is required to make climate adaptation work in the existing urban built environment.
•There is an implementation deficit in climate adaptation policymaking and planning.•Research on implementation outcomes, practices and solution-space is needed.•Cities struggle with stepwise policy-progression in the urban built environment.•Three pragmatic action-strategies are adopted, conditioning and enabling action.•Mixing strategies allows balancing long-term strategy and emerging opportunities.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
In working with local climate adaptation, questions are raised of how to increase the capacity for integrating climate considerations in planning and decision-making. As part of the institutional ...dimension of adaptive capacity, how to foster processes of learning and reflexivity among different administrative units and actors is particularly essential. The aim of this paper is to analyse how the call for systematic organizational learning is manifested in local climate adaptation in two Swedish municipalities, illustrating what forms of learning occur and what learning challenges are identified. Despite the distinct and often contrasting approaches to climate adaptation adopted in the two municipalities-reflecting a variety of learning approaches-there are striking similarities in terms of difficulties in moving beyond the specialized few and reaching general acceptability as well as in the inability to mediate tensions between local sector interests, values and priorities and thus bringing about reflexive learning through experience. The paper shows that the cross-cutting nature of climate change needs to be further acknowledged in practice, including to what extent learning takes place among a specialized few key actors or as part of a systematic and cross-sectoral organizational mainstreaming as well as to what extent learning 'on paper' is actually embraced as 'learning in use' in concrete working practices.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
With climate change already underway, cities are looking for ways to deal with its effects. To balance urban waterfront development and climate adaptation, floating housing is presented as a ...promising solution—however it has not been studied sufficiently. This paper explores floating housing as urban climate experimentation, targeting vision/motivation, practice and upscaling in a national context where support mechanisms and traditions are absent. Interviews with innovation entrepreneurs and municipal planners involved with planning and building floating districts show that, with one exception, the Swedish initiatives are at odds with the theoretical assumptions behind urban climate experimentation. Initiatives are neither challenge-led in terms of climate risk nor inclusive and community-based. Rather, the small-scale private entrepreneurs are pioneers in offering unique living on water as one-off innovations. While allowing experimentation, municipal planners are less convinced by the effectiveness and appropriateness of upscaling. Floating housing may contribute to local identity building and place marketing, but are riddled with implementation challenges regarding shoreline protection, privatization/accessibility, limited market interest and urban development fit. While the floating houses themselves withstand flooding, thus safeguarding individual house owners, they do not protect the land-based city with its vulnerable waterfront development patterns. Results thus suggest the limitation of floating houses in shifting development pathways and strengthening urban climate proofing.
Transformative adaptation is described as decisive to mitigating risks and to seizing opportunities from a changing climate, requiring new ways of governing, planning and collaborating, alongside ...technical innovations. Building municipal capacities for citizen participation in adaptation is important to enabling such transformational changes but remains challenging. By applying capacities distilled from the literature on Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance in a Swedish municipal case, this study aims to disentangle key limits for, and innovations to strengthen, local capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation. Interviews with municipal officials, focus groups with citizens, and document analyses were employed to analyse how climate adaptation and citizen participation are governed, and how these policy areas are interacting and could be bridged. The study points at conditions that foremost prevent bridging established policies and practices on adaptation and citizen participation, stemming from the different logics and distribution of responsibility within, and lacking collaboration between, these separated policy areas. The analysis concludes that potential ways to enable citizen participation in adaptation involve: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups for participation; co‐designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyse and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Climate-related risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts are increasing in cities, illustrated by precipitation-driven pluvial floods. Post-event analyses can aid in reducing urban flood risks, ...but knowledge gaps exist regarding how welfare services and premises are impacted and can be adapted. This study analyses an extreme precipitation-driven event generating extensive flooding in Gävle, Sweden, in 2021. The objective is to increase knowledge about how municipal welfare services are vulnerable to pluvial floods, and of appropriate actions towards improving the response capacity and building more resilient welfare premises and operations. The study shows that the Swedish weather warning system generally worked well, but the analysed property companies lacked strategies and equipment to evade flooding in their properties. Flood damages in 60 analysed buildings were generated by different causes, demonstrating the importance of contemplating the vulnerability of welfare buildings when conducting flood risk assessments. Although the flood event did not cause deaths or serious personal injuries, the study identified impacts on welfare service operations in both the short and long terms. The event increased learning on climate adaptation but did not trigger adaptive action. Identified keys for adaptation include prioritizing premises to protect, knowledge of flood protection equipment, insurance company requirements, and updated emergency plans.
Today, spatial planning is expected to deliver climate adaptation and to manage, merge and balance various societal interests and priorities. To what extent proactive shaping of change is enabled by ...spatial planning practice is less explored. This paper illustrates how the ideals and ambitions of climate adaptation are manifested in waterfront spatial planning via a case study of Norrköping, Sweden. Based on interviews with spatial planners and politicians responsible for strategic urban development planning, our study identifies a divergence in ambitions, approaches and positions. In local development plans, the position taken has less to do with climate risk severity than with an area's perceived political and economic attractiveness. When perceived attractiveness is low, precautionary climate adaptation serves as a pretext not to develop, whereas high perceived attractiveness leads to negotiated pragmatism allowing continued waterfront exploitation. We also identify a fragmentation in spatial planning, with weak interplay between municipal comprehensive planning and local development plans, resulting in ad hoc, case-by-case planning. Furthermore, different planning actors are organizationally compartmentalized, creating unfortunate intra-sectoral silos. We conclude that the integrative, proactive and reflexive potentials of spatial planning to deliver climate adaptation have yet to be realized.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
While strengthening public-private interplay is expected to improve the climate profile of urban planning in terms of mitigation and adaptation, less is known about the practice of such new ...interactive modes of governing. The paper critically examines the role, benefits and limitations of extended public-private interplay in developing a new housing district in Sweden. The developer dialogue between municipal officials and property developers confirms mutual interests, shared understandings and the added value of interacting. However, the closer the dialogue comes to settling agreements, the more difficult it gets for municipal officials to steer the process and its outcomes in favor of climate proofing. Complications with adapting to the new interactive setting means that municipal officials balance between acting as facilitators and/or regulators and property developers between acting as partners, competitors and/or defenders. Refining steering-strategies for sustaining commitments and securing formal agreements are pertinent for using public-private interplay to climate-proof urban planning.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
For coastal areas across the world, sea-level rise and problems of coastal erosion and coastal flooding are expected to increase over the next hundred years. At the same time political pressure for ...continued waterfront planning and development of coastal areas threatens to increase our societal vulnerability, and necessitating climate adaptation in coastal zone management. The institutional dimension has been identified as important for ensuring a more robust adaptation to both current climate variability and future climate change. In this paper, lessons regarding institutional constraints for climate adaptation are drawn from a Swedish case-study on local coastal zone management, illustrating the diverse and complex nature of institutional capacity-building. The aim of the paper is to illustrate critical factors that from an institutional perspective condition the capacity to achieve a more integrated, strategic and proactive climate adaptation and for turning “rules on paper” to working practice, based on case-study experiences from Coastby. Following and expanding a framework for analysing institutional capacity-building we learnt that a selective few key actors had played a critical role in building a strong external networking capacity with a flip-side in terms of a weak internal coordinating capacity and lack of mutual ownership of coastal erosion between sectoral units e.g. risk-management, planning and environment. We also found a weak vertical administrative interplay and lack of formal coherent policy, procedures and regulations for managing coastal erosion between local, regional and national administrations. Further, tensions and trade-offs between policy-agendas, values and political priorities posed a barrier for capacity-building in coastal zone management which calls for processes to mediate conflicting priorities in policy-making, planning and decision-making. The case-study suggests that the ability of the political administrative system to acknowledge and deal with institutional conflicts is a critical condition for ensuring an integrated and proactive climate adaptation in coastal zone management.
► We illustrate institutional conditions for climate adaptation of Swedish coastal zone management. ► There is an implementation gap where rules on paper does not easily translate into coastal zone management practice. ► Strong singular actors may have a flip-side in the form of a weak internal coordination. ► Individuals may have a greater impact on the extent of internal coordination than administrative cultures or traditions. ► The political administrative system does not openly deal with conflicting priorities in coastal zone planning and decision-making.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Local government is attributed a vital role in climate-change adaptation. Previous studies contend that conflicting priorities, insufficient institutional incentives and knowledge of risks, and ...inadequate resources all impede local climate adaptation. Though the importance of local political support in enabling climate adaptation is widely acknowledged, the views of local politicians have rarely been analysed. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with local politicians in Sweden, we explore what affects their engagement in climate adaptation. The study claims that climate adaptation contrary to mitigation is not viewed as political beyond directing attention and sanctioning guidelines set by officials. A limited number of interviewees claim a more strategic political role in adaptation. The combined effect of institutional incentives (e.g. fragmented national guidelines, unappealing goals, and lack of funding), relative weight in local politics, and ability to exercise political leadership (e.g. campaign value, public and media pressure, and lack of ideology) is perceived as too insignificant to trigger strong political engagement. In less-populous municipalities, adaptive measures were highly valued for demonstrating political action.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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