Corfee-Morlot, Cochran, Hallegatte & Teasdale - adaptation policy - urban

Climatic Change (2011) 104:169–197 DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9980-9

Multilevel risk governance and urban adaptation policy Jan Corfee-Morlot · Ian Cochran · Stéphane Hallegatte · Pierre-Jonathan Teasdale

Received: 28 July 2009 / Accepted: 6 July 2010 / Published online: 22 December 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Despite a flurry of activity in cities on climate change and growing interest in the research community, climate policy at city-scale remains fragmented and basic tools to facilitate good decision-making are lacking. This paper draws on an interdisciplinary literature review to establish a multilevel risk governance conceptual framework. It situates the local adaptation policy challenge and action within this to explore a range of institutional questions associated with strengthening local adaptation and related functions of local government. It highlights the value of institutional design to include analytic-deliberative practice, focusing on one possible key tool to support local decision-making—that of boundary organizations to facilitate local science-policy assessment. After exploring a number of examples of boundary organisations in place today, the authors conclude that a number of institutional models are valid. A common feature across the different approaches is the establishment of a science-policy competence through active deliberation and shared analysis engaging experts and decision-makers in an iterative exchange of information. Important features that vary include the geographic scope of operation and the origin of funding, the level and form of engagement of different actors, and the relationship with “producers” of scientific information. National and subnational (regional) governments may play a key role to provide financial and technical assistance to support the creation of such boundary organizations with an explicit mandate to operate at local levels; in turn, in a number of instances boundary organizations have been shown to be able to facilitate local partnerships,

J. Corfee-Morlot (B) · P.-J. Teasdale Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, France e-mail: jan.corfee-morlot@oecd.org I. Cochran CERNA—Mines ParisTech./CDC Climat Recherche, Paris, France S. Hallegatte Center International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement and École Nationale de la Météorologie, Météo France, Paris, France

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engagement and decision-making on adaptation. While the agenda for multi-level governance of climate change is inevitably much broader than this, first steps by national governments to work with sub-national governments, urban authorities and other stakeholders to advance capacity in this area could be an important step for local adaptation policy agenda.

1 Introduction The climate policy challenge for cities can be conceptualized as a two-way struggle to achieve climate change protection and socio-economic development simultaneously.

One will affect the other—they are inseparable.

Just as cities are part of the problem, they are also part of the solution to climate change. Cities concentrate economic activity, population and thus also sources of energy and waste-related greenhouse gas emissions (IEA 2008). Further, given worldwide urbanization trends, urban development patterns as we currently understand them today are a main driver of vulnerability to climate change. However, these same characteristics suggest that local authorities and other decision-makers that shape urban development may also play a central role in what is becoming an urgent agenda to adapt to climate change. The right choice of urban policies is particularly important to ensure that long-lived infrastructures—commercial and residential buildings, roads and ports, water and transport networks—are designed to withstand the expected increase in climate variability and mean change; these same investments in the urban built environment may simultaneously improve the energy and emission performance of urban economies (Kirshen et al. 2008; Rosenzweig et al.

2007). Integrated urban planning is thus central to both adaptation and mitigation efforts. For example, land use decisions and zoning may exacerbate or limit the vulnerability of urban dwellers and of infrastructures to the growing threat of climate change (see, e.g., Hallegatte, Henriet, Corfee-Morlot, this volume).

Adaptation is necessarily local and will include disaster management to limit vulnerability to current and future hazards such as floods, water shortage or heat waves (e.g. Satterthwaite et al. 2009; Schipper and Pelling 2006; UNISDR 2008).

This will include actions to address the physical drivers of vulnerability, such as infrastructure standards, and actions to alter more systemic drivers such as laws, urban planning or early warning systems as well as effort to build capacity to adapt through better education or information provision (Adger et al. 2007, 2009). Also, as Hurricane Katrina reminded us, climate extremes often fall the hardest on the poor (Mathew 2007). The urban poor may be more exposed to climate change than the average urban dweller, since they are likely to occupy the cheapest land, sometimes illegally and often the most exposed, such as floodplain areas seen in the Dharavi slums in Mumbai (Ranger et al., this volume) and the New Orleans’ 9th Ward (Logan 2006). The poor thus also have comparatively lower adaptive capacity in part due to fewer resources to spend on either reactive or planned adaptation (Satterthwaite et al. 2009; Mathew 2007; Solecki et al. 2005). The high vulnerability of often-large numbers of urban poor to climate change and extremes makes urban policy and processes a key center for design and implementation of anticipatory adaptation action, including disaster risk management.

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Inevitably, urban-scale and other local action is an important part of national and international policy agendas on climate change (Burton et al. 2007). If nothing else, urban actors will be the center of implementation through action on the ground (Moser 2009a; Wilbanks et al. 2007). There is also significant opportunity to integrate climate change into ongoing centers of urban planning and management—such as transportation and land use planning, public housing for the poor, or disaster prevention and response—and this raises the potential for urban adaptation policy to have an impact (Carmin et al. 2009; Kamal-Chaoui and Robert 2009). Cities and other sub-national centers of governance also provide opportunities for experimentation and learning about climate change, acting as laboratories of change and testing new approaches (Rabe 2004; Corfee-Morlot et al. 2009). Finally, local authorities work in close proximity with a multitude of key local decision-makers (Brunner 1996; Brunner et al. 2005; Grindle and Thomas 1991; Healy 1997)—such as households, community organizations or businesses as well as urban planners or water resource managers—who will invest or not in adaptation (or mitigation) measures (Ostrom 2009; Carmin et al. 2009). It is this multitude of decisions and actors that when combined will comprise the collective response to climate change (Adger et al. 2007; Fankhauser et al. 2008).

Despite increasing levels of attention and action on climate change at the level of the city, much of the action to date has been largely decoupled from national policy frameworks. Similarly, national policy frameworks have not always been designed to incentivize and advance the effectiveness of local jurisdictions, even though they have potential to do so (DeAngelo and Harvey 1998). Moreover, relatively little research has considered the issue of the multilevel risk governance of climate change, in particular with respect to adaptation, and the unique role of cities, and urban authorities in particular, within such a framework.1 This paper focuses in particular on the cross-scale, multilevel governance linkages between national and local policy for adaptation, and draws out lessons from results of other papers of this issue as well as from an emerging literature in this area.

Notably on the urban policy challenge, the focus is on: Why, what and how might national policy assist and empower local governments to become more ef fective actors in the climate policy arena?

The paper begins by establishing a conceptual framework for understanding policy decision-making, and multilevel risk governance of climate change based on an inter-disciplinary review of the academic literature (Section 2). Within this framework, we elaborate a number of key institutional governance characteristics that will determine or limit the capacity for local authorities to exploit the potential for local policy to become a meaningful driver of change. Section 3 considers the need for analytic-deliberative processes at local scale, starting with science-policy assessment that is framed locally; this suggests building institutional capacity at local

1 For

example, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report acknowledges the role of cities in design and delivery of climate responses and relevant academic literature reviewed, however it remains marginal to the full volume, which is largely focused on the global dimensions of the problem and its possible solutions. For chapters that address local dimensions of climate change and policy responses see: Wilbanks et al. (2007), Gupta et al. (2007), Sathaye et al. (2007), Bulkeley and Betsill (2005) and Betsill and Bulkeley (2007) are notable exceptions in bringing attention to multi-level governance.

The UNFCCC (2006) in their review of progress in national policy under the Kyoto Protocol also highlight some trends for national governments to work more closely with local governments.

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levels to bring deliberation to analysis through engagement of different types of stakeholders, including experts and policy makers as well as other non-governmental actors to support adaptation decision-making. Section 3 also illustrates these issues by examining other articles in this volume. In Section 4, we test this conceptual framework by examining these institutional features through the exploration a number of practical examples of institutional models for boundary organizations to support local vulnerability and impact assessment as well as adaptation decisionmaking. Finally we generalize conclusions from these selected examples to consider the opportunities and challenges for “linked up” action across levels of governance on climate change.

2 Towards multilevel climate risk governance: a conceptual framework Despite growing recognition of global climate change, its understanding is necessarily characterized by broad uncertainty, hence the use of the terms risk and risk governance (De Marchi 2003; Renn 2001, 2008). This is because global climate change encompasses a complex array of interactions between a large number of human and natural systems across vast spatial and temporal scales, which in turn challenges scientific assessments and policy efforts that aim to identify and manage these changes (Rayner and Malone 1998; Schellnhuber et al. 2004; Fisher et al. 2007).

Framing climate policy decisions as a risk management issue has gained salience in policy circles over the last decade or more (IPCC 1996, 2007).

Notions in the risk governance arena stem from a wide variety of conceptual frameworks and competing social theories that attempt to characterize the relationships between different centers of influence or different types of actors on environmental risk outcomes. Renn (2008) highlights broad agreement across such frameworks on the rise of pluralism in today’s society and the need to focus on decision-making processes (rather than only on decision outcomes) that embrace and use that pluralism. However social theories disagree widely about how to do this and who or what are the main drivers of change. Social research literature on risk governance and institutional questions can be organized around several main dimensions of theoretical influence (Krimsky 1992; O’Riordan and Jordan 1999; Renn 2008): i) the scale of decision-making ranging from individual to collective decision-making, ii) the dominance of technical or factual knowledge ranging from realist (i.e. where it dominates) to constructivist perspectives (i.e. where valuecentered and/or cultural influences alter the perception of reality); iii) the extent of organizational or institutional influence versus the influence of individual human agency on policy decisions.

Further, the issue of climate change is often presented in policy analysis as a classic problem of collective action (e.g. Stavins 1997; Olson 1965), or a challenge of the global commons (e.g. Carraro 2003; Hardin 1968), where international cooperation is made difficult if not impossible due to asymmetry between who bears the costs of action and who benefits from action (Corfee-Morlot and Agrawala 2004; Ostrom 2009; Stavins 1997). More recent empirical analysis challenges this view, which is based on a rational actor paradigm. Citing extensive evidence, this research shows that social cooperation does occur to resolve common resource problems when: i) the social dilemma is present in small or medium size problems; ii) there are

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multiple externalities associated to inaction, or alternatively multiple benefits of action (Ostrom et al. 2002; Ostrom 2009). Such co-benefits of climate action are particularly visible at small and medium scales, which in turn alters the mix of benefits and costs and overall economic and social incentives for action (Hallegatte, Henriet and Corfee-Morlot, this volume; Ostrom 2009). Policies that deliver a range of different types of environmental, social and developmental benefits may be the most salient, particularly at local levels, as authorities strive to juggle a range of competing policy objectives. This research sets the scene for understanding climate change decision-making in the urban context where it is necessarily part of a larger local sustainability challenge and the benefits of climate change actions are integrated with other local policy goals, such as providing clean air, safe streets and jobs for local residents.

This paper focuses on collective decision-making as a central feature of the policy process and looks in particular at the urban scale adaptation policy challenge.

It takes a “co-constructivist” view that acknowledges the need for and influence of scientific and expert information to support decisions to manage global environmental problems such as climate change, as well as the need to couple this information with contextual interpretation of the “facts”, including the integration of science and technical information with local knowledge (Benton and Redclift 1994; Herrick 2004; Lorenzoni et al. 2000; Stern and Fineberg 1996; Wynne 2002). With this co-constructivist approach, we assume that local climate policy decisions will need to build on knowledge that is co-produced through local interpretation and interactions with more formalized scientific and technical knowledge. Our approach also emphasizes on the institutional structure of decision contexts and on the groups of social actors that influence policy decisions (Hall 1993; March and Olsen 1984; O’Riordan and Jordan 1999). The institutional dimension is important because it introduces a path dependency where (often pre-existing) institutions shape future options.

2.1 Agency, networks and power in risk governance Given this, it is necessary to explore briefly questions of institutions, agency and power. In this area the Habermasian notion of circuits of power provides a useful starting point for a conceptual model (Habermas 1998: 354; Carvalho and Burgess 2005). It highlights how deliberation and persuasion are a necessary component of any policy process where a variety of actors mediate across different types of scientific, expert and local knowledge to inform public policy decisions (Fig. 1; Corfee-Morlot 2009; Moser 2009a; Renn 2008).

An extension of Habermas’ communicative rationality, this model comprises three basic layers of decision-making and influence. These are posited here to hold across levels of policymaking (from local to national, as further described below): •

•

a “core area” of public decision-making with institutions that have formal governmental decision-making powers, e.g. governmental administrations including local and city authorities, judicial system, and/or parliamentary bodies. Capacity to act varies with organizational form and complexity. an “inner periphery” operates close to the core and includes a range of institutions that have a degree of autonomy and self-governance functions. These institutions are equipped with rights and self-governance delegated by the state

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Mass media, and civil-social infrastructure as a translators, filters of substantive knowledge

Deliberation, Argument and Persuasion Outer periphery

Mitigation: How much & when?

Inner periphery

Core activities: formal government decisionmaking

Science, expert analysis & assessment Adaptation: Where, how?

Which priorities?

Fig. 1 Circulation of power for public decision-making on climate change

•

(i.e. universities, public insurance systems, professional agencies and associations, charitable organizations and foundations). an “outer periphery” of policy action, which encompasses a wider variety of “suppliers” of information and ideas for policy decisions and “customers” who are the target audience of decisions. This includes experts, businesses, and consumers as well as the media; it is the civil-social infrastructure of the public sphere.

This model emphasizes the social integration function of public discourse and decisions, where the true outer periphery is part of the civil-social infrastructure of the public sphere, and is influenced by the mass media. To gain legitimacy, binding decisions “must be steered by communication flows that start at the periphery and pass through sluices of democratic and constitutional procedures...” (Habermas 1998: 356). In the case of climate change, expert knowledge—from science to technical and economic analyses—shape decisions, however socially mediated pathways for communication are also central (Fig. 1).

But these theoretical constructs do not say much about the role of different actors in decision-making raising the question of: what role exists for different types of actors to shape local climate policy decisions? Key actors in the policy process typically fall into four key categories: state actors (governments or related institutions, including local governments), market actors (business and business institutions), scientific actors (including other expert domains such as economics), and civil society,

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which encompasses the media as well as social movement organizations (Fisher 2004; Social Learning Group 2001).

Many have argued that the authority of state actors is considerably weaker today than it has been in the past on issues of public concern, giving rise to the influence of non-state actors and institutions (Corfee-Morlot et al. 2007; Levy and Newell 2005; Sathaye et al. 2007; Social Learning Group 2001). Most notably, civil society in the form of environmental social movement organizations have played an increasingly large role in shaping practices on environmental policy and outcomes by championing ideas and providing platforms for dialogue and debate (Bramwell 1989; Brulle 2000; Carpenter 2001; Gough and Shackley 2001; Hall and Taplin 2006; Yearley 1994). The business community has also had a growing influence on climate policy (Falkner 2003; Levy and Newell 2005; Newell 2000), and more recently this includes engagement spanning national to local levels of adaptation decision-making (Moser 2009b; McKenzie Hedger et al. 2006; UKCIP 2008). Aside from their direct influence in shaping policy, non-governmental actors also play a “watchdog” role to assess how well policies are performing with respect to the stated goals (Brown and Jacobson 1998; Levy and Newell 2005; Gough and Shackley 2001).

The expert community plays a particularly influential role in environmental policy processes, where science and economics have typically dominated (Layzer 2006), notably on the specific issue of climate change (Hart and Victor 1993; Kwa 2001; Miller and Edwards 2001). The notion of epistemic communities is relevant here, where authoritative experts operate within a common belief structure to collaborate both within and outside of government to affect policy change (Haas 1990). The influence of epistemic communities has been observed in the arena of national and international climate politics (Hart and Victor 1993; Agrawala 1998). However on the issue of climate change adaptation, non-governmental networks of actors have been slow to mobilize support for action, in part due to a fear of weakening the argument for mitigation action (Burton et al. 2007; Pielke Jr 2006).

Finally, the media also shape discourse from the outer peripheries of any decision process by influencing public perception and the call for social change (Habermas 1998). Media coverage does not tell people what to think but it is able to direct public attention toward specific policy concerns and influence agenda setting for social concerns and policy issues (Mazur and Lee 1993). Moser (2009b) demonstrates an explosion of interest in the issue of adaptation in the printed news coverage of the United States accompanying a rise in public interest. Film, television and the internet may be even more powerful than newspaper coverage today, as they rely on visual information.2 Images help to relate distant, complex environmental concepts to a person’s own experience and feelings to quickly bring meaning to them (Tversky and Kahneman 1973; Leiserowitz 2006). The rise in visual media coverage of climate change in the last decade—including images of melting mountain glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, stranded polar bears and flooded river basins and coastal zones—suggests a dramatic rise in the “availability” and “affect” heuristics on climate change, which in turn has helped to raise awareness about the issue (Leiserowitz 2005, 2006).

2 For

example, widespread visual media coverage of climate change was in part stimulated by the international release of the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore and by a growing number of television documentaries on climate change at roughly the same time (Corfee-Morlot 2009; Moser 2009a).

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Indeed, the media act as translators or filters of substantive expert knowledge and influence local understanding of the issue of climate change (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). Different actors may also influence the media’s uptake of climate issues by actively cultivating their engagement; for example a number of individual scientists have been effective in working with the media stimulate public attention in the past, helping to propel the issue onto the policy agenda (Hart and Victor 1993; CorfeeMorlot et al. 2007). Thus another dimension of a multilevel risk governance model is the influence of, access to and ability to engage the media at different levels of decision-making to raise awareness and eventually help to engender a call for social change.

2.2 Multilevel climate risk governance From an institutional perspective, understanding and acting to manage risk is ultimately embedded in a multilevel governance context where decision-making at local scale is enabled and constrained by policy decisions and institutions at regional and national level (Hooghe and Marks 2003; Betsill and Bulkeley 2004; Wilbanks et al. 2007). A multilevel climate risk governance framework focuses on collective decision-making processes although it recognizes the influence of individual values and perceptions on these and the importance of values, culture and local context in decisions about how to respond to climate change. This framework is consistent with that proposed by Moser (2009a), which situates adaptation decisions within a broad framework of cultural and scientific influence, and where politics and the economy in any particular location provide the contextual drivers for decisions. In turn these drivers will determine the particular communities of actors and the sectors eventually engaged, i.e. the companies, agencies, and other stakeholders who ultimately make decisions.

Indeed, using a multilevel risk governance framework breaks down understanding of the state as a single actor to better characterize the relationships between different levels of governance and between the different types of actors within each of these. Paterson (2008) suggests that the state is embedded in a number of complex and often contradictory social relationships that structure action and responses to environmental issues. These relationships can also be seen to span multiple levels of governance, involving different configurations of actors and priorities depending on the level and type of decision-making. Multilevel governance establishes a flexible conceptual framework to understand the relationships between cities, regions and nations across mitigation and adaptation policy issues as well as across a widening range of governmental and non-governmental actors (Betsill and Bulkeley 2004; Cash et al. 2006; Bulkeley and Schroeder 2008).

Any multilevel risk governance framework will encompass at least two different dimensions of action and influence, and both warrant attention: the vertical or hierarchical dimension across levels of governance and the horizontal dimension, or inclusive nature, of governance (Betsill and Bulkeley 2004; Hooghe and Marks 2003).3 With respect to the vertical dimension, adaptation (or mitigation) may be

3 The

diffusion of authority across and between levels bears similarity to other theories such as polycentric, multi-perspective or multi-tiered governance (Hooghe and Marks 2003; Ostrom 2009).

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guided or constrained through top-down mandates or national policy, but its implementation will be inevitably local in character (Pelling 2006; Urwin and Jordan 2008).

In a recent example of such a multilevel information exchange on adaptation along the vertical dimension, the French government is defining a national adaptation plan using an open consultation approach, where local governments have been invited together with other representatives of the government, business, scientists and civil society to provide inputs.4 Such an exchange is necessarily two-way as information and specific knowledge gained from local experience and experimentation will inevitably also contribute to the design of policy at the central level (Corfee-Morlot et al. 2009; Folke et al. 2005; Moser 2006a, Vogel et al. 2007).

Within the horizontal dimensions is the key role of an open, participatory decision process. This puts emphasis on “governance” rather than on “governments” as a center for decision making and includes giving “voice” or influence in the policy dialogue process to business, research and environmental non-governmental organizations.5 From a policy perspective, a key advantage of working at local levels is that authorities have good proximity to local stakeholders and it is possible to generate good understanding of local contextual factors that will matter to decisions about how to manage climate change (Healy 1997; Ostrom 2009). Local governments, in particular, can help to build a “policy space” for a deliberative-analytical exchange that links local stakeholders and the expert community in an effort to create a common vision of the future (Brunner 1996; Brunner et al. 2005; Cash and Moser 2000; Grindle and Thomas 1991). Further, preferences of actors tend to be more homogenous across smaller than larger units (Ostrom 2009). Thus, if the goal is a resilient, safe, and clean city, having a common understanding or vision of what such a future might comprise and the influence of climate change at urban scale is a first step to achieving it (Corfee-Morlot et al. 2009; Moser 2006a; Moser and Dilling 2006).

Horizontally, there is also increasing evidence of multilevel governance through transnational networks on climate change, where actors work across organisational boundaries to influence outcomes (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005; Bulkeley and Moser 2007). At the sub-national level, some of these horizontal relationships have been created through formalised information networks and coalitions acting both nationally and internationally, including ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Protection, the Climate Alliance, the C-40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, and the Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative in the US, among others.6 These groups have given an institutional foundation to concerted effort and collaboration on climate change at city level (Aall et al. 2007).

4 See

details in the website of the French National Adaptation Plan (in French) on http:// www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/Le-lancement-de-la-concertation,11584.html, accessed May 10, 2010.

5 These

are also fondly known as BINGOs, RINGOs and ENGOs, representing business and industry, research and environmental non-governmental organizations, respectively.

6 These networks have received increasing attention in social research on climate policy. For example,

ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Protection network has been extensively analyzed in the literature (Aall et al. 2007; Betsill and Bulkeley 2004, 2007; Lindseth 2004). The focus of such networks has typically been on mitigation however attention to adaptation is growing. See for example Lowe et al. (2009) on the US Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative. Analysis such networks and their influence on local adaptation is beyond the scope of this paper.

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Table 1 Key obstacles to local adaptation action Jurisdictional and institutional

Lack of mandate to address climate issues National or regional laws, rules or regulations that lead to mal-adaptation to increase vulnerability over time Ill-adapted institutional designs to convene or coordinate across relevant issues (vertically and/or horizontally)

Political

Local authorities “too close” to different interests Pressures of short-term electoral cycles on effective risk management and long time lag to reap full adaptation benefits Lack of willingness to accept costs and behavioral change Pressure to maintain BAU development pathways

Economic and budgetary

Distribution of perceived and real costs and benefits Lack of resources or funding to address the problems identified

Technical or scientific

Scientific uncertainty Inadequate understanding or ignorance of climate change risks Lack of technical capacity or access to expertise Lack of scale relevant scientific or technical information

After Adger et al. (2009), Bulkeley et al. (2009), Carmin et al. (2009), Moser (2006a, 2009a), Sippel and Jenssen (2009), Ostrom (2009), Qi et al. (2008)

The multilevel risk governance conceptual framework presented above can provide important insights when applied to an analysis of the institutional capacities to overcome the obstacles to good local level climate governance. Key obstacles to local decision-making on climate change, and more particularly adaptation are outlined in Table 1.

These different barriers are often intertwined and it is useful to illustrate this before moving on to possible remedies. For example, let us consider the jurisdictional and policy barriers that make it difficult for local decision-makers to go against political pressure to alter development patterns away from business-as-usual pathways.

Often, some share of long-term climate change risk at urban scale is managed by local authorities, who cannot easily oppose short-term pressure of the local constituency representing her or his voters. The local incentives to act may be even more limited where risks are shared at higher levels (e.g., through a national insurance scheme, or through inter-region financial fluxes) unless such programs are designed with this in mind (e.g. as with the US National Flood Insurance program). This is because climate-related crises or disasters can lead to external aid after they hit, while prevention has often to be funded locally and may be difficult to implement without a clear understanding of the local benefits of such action. A strong mandate for action may be necessary from the national or regional government, so as to give local decision-makers an official framework within which to act as well as the possibility to ‘pass’ any political blame and possibly costs upwards (Betsill 2001; Bulkeley and Kern 2006; Carmin et al. 2009; Sugiyama and Takeuchi 2008).7

7 For

example, this is what has occurred in France through the “Plan de Prévention des Risques”, which requires city-scale governments to work with sub-national regional governments (at préfectural levels) to develop plans aiming to prevent or to limit risks of natural disasters e.g. flood risk.

Under this framework, some areas have been identified as banned for (further) development.

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Developing capacity to address these barriers is an essential part of moving local climate policy ahead. Capacities to meet the climate policy challenge can be clustered along the same dimensions as the barriers outlined above. Table 2 considers key capacities for action according to a range of institutional drivers that operate across scales of governance to shape local decisions to address climate change. The key

Table 2 Institutional capacities and other drivers of local scale climate action Capacities and drivers of change Government functions

Jurisdictional and political capacity

Financial capacity

Coordination / planning capacities (including technical capacity)

Local authorities: Public: city, county or other public authorities Implement local decisions as foreseen under national or regional law Establish local climate policy framework – near & long-term goals – to coordinate strategically across sectoral and with other local jurisdictions in the same metropolitan area

Seek and establish support for locally adapted policies and measures e.g. public private partnerships and local fiscal policies

Seek new authority where necessary to achieve goals

Identify local priorities – enhance local/regional understanding by working with local actors Where authority exists – act autonomously e.g. through land use planning, decisions on local infrastructure (e.g. local roads, urban planning and zoning, flood control – storm water drainage systems, water supply, local parks/reserves/green-spaces, sanitary and waste management) Raise awareness, create deliberative “space” for participatory decision-making

National and/or regional authorities: state or provincial governmental authorities Clear delineations of jurisdiction.

Drivers

Adjust the degree of decentralisation of necessary policy competencies and authorities Prioritise & set out time frames for local action (e.g. by sector)

Provide incentives and funding to enable local action on climate change

Ensure that local decision-makers have the tools, information & appropriate institutional context to deliver good decisions

Fund core analytic inputs to facilitate local decision-making, including scientific research

Centre-region (local) contracts Other nongovernmental actors

Semi-autonomous public research or technical institutions (e.g. national universities or research institutions; water resource management boards) Private sector: local industry & business, tourists, households Local environmental or consumer organizations Local & regional experts (universities, consultants)

Tools to support decisionmaking

Legal advise and contractual tools

Robust contractual mechanisms for public-private investment (e.g. for infrastructure development)

Local vulnerability mapping or full climate risk assessment

Economic and financial assessment information and tools

Link scientific and economic assessment of climate impacts with ongoing urban planning processes (e.g. land use and infrastructure development);

Deliberative and processes designed to support local decision-making (e.g. analytic-deliberative model)

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drivers are: government functions and roles; key actors and institutions; tools for decision-making (Adger et al. 2009; Moser 2009a; Bulkeley et al. 2009; Betsill 2001; Carmin et al. 2009; Qi et al. 2008; Schreurs 2008; Sugiyama and Takeuchi 2008).

How each of these different drivers join up to work across levels of governance will determine the boundaries for local decision-making and alter the range of possible local outcomes.

3 Analytic-deliberative process to support local adaptation decisions Lack of scale relevant technical and scientific information, and capacity to use such information at local levels, remains an important barrier to adaptation action today. To understand and properly assess adaptation options, urban decision-makers require information about how climate change may play out in local contexts to impact people, urban settlements and infrastructure. What will the temperatures of the 2020s or 2030s be? How will flood risk change in the coming half a century or more, or even more pertinently, over the life of the infrastructure built today? And how will these climate changes interface with urban environments?

This information is often produced through specifically funded applied research projects. Examples of such projects are the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) at Columbia University, the Australian RMIT Global Cities Research Institute, or research programs like the program “Villes Durables” (Sustainable cities) or the French National Research Agency. But to inform decisionmakers, academic research projects—even very applied ones—are often insufficient.

Any such climate risk assessment must necessarily include some form of analyticdeliberation to help local communities co-produce relevant information and use this to make decisions about adaptation. The basic stages of analytic-deliberation are (NRC 2009): i) broad-based effort to frame the decision problems, identify stakes and interests of those affected; ii) assessment; iii) evaluation; iv) policy decision and implementation; v) monitoring and feedback, and back again to (re-)frame the problem based on the new state of play. These can be seen to work in an on-going and iterative manner, across changing decision contexts and evolving understanding of different dimensions of dealing with climate change. When designed well, such a process will help to build trust and understanding across affected stakeholders, experts and policy communities (Folke et al. 2005; NRC 2008, 2009, Stern and Fineberg 2006).

A number of tools, technical knowledge and institutional mechanisms can be envisaged to help build the capacity of local authorities to plan and coordinate climate policy. Just as local GHG inventories and projections are an essential tool to evaluate and support mitigation decisions, vulnerability, impact and risk assessment will be needed to support adaptation decisions. Economic and demographic projections will also be needed to bring the socio-economic dimension of the climate problem to meet the more technical scientific questions presented by climate change (NRC 2007, 2009). Such assessments comprise the knowledge base or foundation that can be used in a local decision process to work closely and effectively with local constituencies to understand and inform decisions about risks of climate change.

Yet gathering sufficient and appropriate types of information remains a challenge for local level action (Betsill 2001, Bulkeley et al. 2009, Carmin et al. 2009,

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Satterthwaite 2008, Hallegatte, Henriet and Corfee-Morlot, this volume). Recently, new methods and tools have been developed to provide relevant local information to support local adaptation planning. These include, for example, the World Bank Screening Tool ADAPT and the SERVIR toolkit (developed by USAID, NASA and others).8 Further, tools developed for other policy questions (e.g., land-use planning, risk management), can be adjusted to include climate change and used for adaptation policy design. These tools and others build on spatial analysis, geographic information systems and improved computing ability to offer decision support on a local scale. However, such tools do not yet offer comprehensive coverage and they are research-oriented rather than policy-oriented. Using such new methods and tools, still takes time, expertise and money.

3.1 Criteria for successful science-policy assessment An important step in local climate risk governance is to structure science-policy assessment to function well across and within different jurisdictional contexts— whether it be international, national or local level—to provide usable information for decision-makers, within an iterative and interactive deliberative process to support decision-making (Clark and Majone 1985; Mitchell et al. 2006; NRC 2007, 2009; Stern and Fineberg 1996; Vogel et al. 2007).

Three central performance criteria are relevant to any sustainability science-policy assessment: the credibility, the legitimacy and the salience of the assessment (Cash et al. 2003; NRC 2007). Taking each of these briefly in turn, credibility is about whether the science assessment has met acceptable quality standards as judged by other scientists or the peer expert community (Cash et al. 2003; Mitchell et al. 2006; NRC 2009).

A different set of questions surround the need for legitimacy. Providing useable scientific information and assessment is only one part of the challenge to support climate change decision-making (NRC 2008, 2009; Stern and Fineberg 1996). When a policy challenge combines broad uncertainty with potentially high decision-stakes for society as a whole, political legitimacy requires special attention to how decisions are made and who is engaged in the decision process (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Jasanoff 1990; Ostrom et al. 2002). While science and other substantive expert knowledge remains important, it is not sufficient to provide a political basis for policy decisions (Jasanoff 1990; Moser 2009a; Renn 2001, 2008; NRC 2007, 2009). This procedural question will be as important to determining the success of climate policy over time as what the decisions are (Dietz et al. 2003; Dietz 2003; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). Empirical research suggests the value of “deliberative spaces” to raise stakeholder awareness, build trust and understanding and ultimately facilitate collective decision-making to protect common environmental resources (Folke et al. 2005; Ostrom 1990, 2000; Ostrom et al. 2002; Vogel et al. 2007). This contributes to problem solving over time through meaningful exchange and dialogue among affected stakeholders and experts, to build human

8 For

a recent review of such tools see GTZ, “Mainstreaming tools and methods” http://www.gtz.de/ en/themen/umwelt-infrastruktur/umweltpolitik/27678.htm [accessed 20 May 2010].

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and social capital to support decision-making (Bohman 1996; Dietz 2003; Healy 1997; Rydin 2003).

On the issue of salience, the ambiguity and complexity of the science of climate change raises the need for mediation between the credibility of scientific activity on the one hand, and the interpretation of the science to bring closure for policy decisions on the other (Clark and Majone 1985; NRC 2007). Framing science-policy assessments in consultation with users of the assessments can also increase the salience of the results.

3.2 The role of boundary organizations An important notion in the area of social research dealing with science-policy interactions is that of “boundary work” or “boundary organizations” (Gieryn 1983; Jasanoff 1990; Guston 2001; Cash et al. 2003; Moser and Tribbia 2006). Originally introduced

by Gieryn (1983), boundary work describes actions that demarcate the differences and competing authority between scientists and others. Jasanoff’s work and more recent research shows an essential blurring of the boundary between science and politics, which allows for essential negotiation and reconciliation between these perspectives, for example, in the definition of “acceptable risk” (Jasanoff 1990:18; see also a more recent review of the literature in NRC 2009). Negotiation among scientists to bring together divergent technical opinions is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to bring closure on a public policy issue; defining acceptable risk is necessarily a socio-political decision even if it is couched in technical evidence (Jasanoff 1990; Guston 2001, Cash et al. 2003; NRC 2009). There is a need to balance the inevitable trade-offs between credibility, legitimacy and salience in effort to build knowledge systems to support sustainability decision-making and boundary organizations can play a role to facilitate this (Cash et al. 2003; Vogel et al.

2007).

A number of authors have suggested the possible value of boundary organizations to facilitate negotiation between science assessment and decision-making and in the context of regional and local adaptation (Vogel et al. 2007; Moser and Tribbia 2006; NRC 2009). The literature suggests that boundary organizations can be structured to help co-produce credible scientific and socio-economic analytical extensions of global and regional assessments to local contexts in consultation with local stakeholders (Cash et al. 2003; NRC 2009). Boundary organizations may also have a key role to play in providing a face-to-face or more direct two-way exchange between the expert community producing such information on the one hand, and public officials and other decision-makers who are potentially users of such information on the other, building networks of relationships, trust and understanding so as to facilitate decision-making over time (Folke et al. 2005; Moser and Tribbia 2006). A basic challenge is also to better frame the questions for assessment such that they are informed by local concerns and thus likely to render results that are also more legitimate and salient in a local context (Vogel et al. 2007). Finally, such organizations may also provide essential communication functions to help mediate, popularise and render more accessible and salient scientific information about climate change in a political context and promote action across different types of local decision-makers (Corfee-Morlot 2009; Moser 2006a; Vogel et al. 2007).

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3.3 Science-policy and analytic deliberation in practice—this volume Drawing on other articles in this volume, it is possible to illustrate the inter-play across the criteria noted above and the need for an analytic-deliberative mechanism in local adaptation decision contexts. Climatic changes are increasingly observed in real time, and projections on a regional scale have become more readily available (even if still highly uncertain). Hunt and Watkiss (this volume) provide a review of recent analyses of climate change impact at city scale, and show there is a small but growing body of science and economic analysis in this domain. The two case studies on Copenhagen and Mumbai are illustrative of an emerging local integrated assessment literature that offers much local scale scientific and economic data and information (Hallegatte, Ranger et al. and Ranger et al., respectively, this volume).

The availability of results such as these should increase the potential to make good decisions about adaptation today, particularly at local levels (Cash and Moser 2000; Cash et al. 2006).

Yet supporting actual adaptation and related management decisions will undoubtedly require not only additional scientific and/or economic analysis but also dialogue around this information. To be usable and fully credible for adaptation planning, projections of climate change require careful coupling with local socio-economic scenarios. They also require extension with specific models, like hydrological models to anticipate the effects on freshwater flows to anticipate economic consequences in the urban context, (NRC 2007, 2009; see also a methodological analysis in Hallegatte, Henriet and Corfee-Morlot, this volume). For example, in urban coastal locations, consideration of sea level rise will need to be based not only on population and urban development patterns but also on local physical conditions such as coastal land area subsidence, which in turn may relate to groundwater conditions and demographic trends that drive the demand for freshwater (Hanson et al. this volume). Yet due to lack of data or projections, or time and resources to tackle complex local issues, many assessments make simplifying assumptions and ignore one or more of these elements. This was the case in the local assessments of Mumbai and Copenhagen in this volume, for example, where socio-economic projections were omitted due to lack of reliable local projections. While these assessments are scientifically credible and provide first insights into possible cost-effective adaptations, they are not sufficiently complete or legitimate to have direct influence on policy or practitioner decisions in these urban locations.

Moreover a key issue is how local decision-makers access and use scientific and expert information about climate change—such as that contained in this volume.

Moser and Tribbia (2006) explore this with respect to coastal zone issues in California to show that coastal zone managers, and other relevant decision-makers, simply do not use climate change information from scientific journals; instead they rely upon other more informal sources and formats including in-house experts and colleagues, the media or internet and they prefer easily accessible formats (e.g. maps or GPS tools). Accessing decision-makers, engaging in dialogue and rendering information accessible extends beyond the traditional technical boundaries of science-policy analysis or assessment; seriously tackling these steps implies the need for additional time, effort and resources.

Beyond additional scientific work, indeed, there is also a need to couple scientific or other expert assessment with a means for dialogue and exchange between the

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producers and the users of such information so as to render the information more salient and legitimate. In another illustration, Hanson et al. (this volume) apply a simplified methodology to assess 136 major port cities with respect to coastal flood risks. Although credible from a scientific standpoint to identify “hot spots” of localities or regions with high exposure to coastal flooding from climate extremes, the information provided by this assessment is not functionally useful to support local decisions.

Understanding and managing vulnerability, in this case to coastal flood risk, will require additional detailed analysis, informed by local knowledge, and reflection across a range of different types of decision-makers in these cities (Vogel et al.

2007). The Copenhagen and Mumbai case studies in the present volume represent intermediate cases, in which more detailed analyses provide spatially explicit information about changing risks and adaptation benefits. This information helps local stakeholders and decision-makers assess the need for action and envisage possible adaptation options. But these studies require additional analysis to lead to actual measures, like specific investments or regulation changes. Such additional analysis will need to engage coastal zone managers, urban planners and local residents around sound science and economic assessment (Moser and Tribbia 2006).

Indeed, adaptation policy decisions will require careful negotiation between the more political policy process—that will necessarily make judgments about “acceptable risk”—and the scientific and economic domains. The Mumbai case study (Ranger et al., this volume) illustrates this, revealing highly uncertain results due to lack of data and model uncertainty, combined with high decision stakes from an economic and human point of view (see also Bhagat et al. 2006; OECD 2010). In that case, scientific results are important, but are clearly insufficient to inform a decision in the absence of a strong political process to assist with the interpretation of the uncertain science in the local political context.

One advantage of more detailed local and/or sub-national impact or risk assessments combined with deliberative process is that it can be expected to positively influence the political capacity of local governments to act on climate change (Harris 2001; Shackley and Deanwood 2002; Corfee-Morlot 2009). Raising political awareness and capacity to act should in turn facilitate the ability to put deliberativeanalytic policy processes in place at local levels to advance adaptation. However, while we know that such processes are widely advocated to and by governments (e.g. see OECD 2009), it is less clear whether and how they are developing or functioning in practice.

4 Adaptation boundary organizations and analytic deliberation in practice This section explores the need for analytic-deliberative approaches to shape sciencepolicy assessment such that it provides useable information and meets the three quality criteria laid out above. As noted, boundary organizations may help to fill the gaps between the production of credible scientific/technical assessments and the need for also more salient and legitimate science-policy assessments at local scales to support sustainability decisions (Folke et al. 2005; Cash et al. 2003). Others authors have pointed to the contribution that boundary organizations could make to support local adaptation decisions in particular, possibly to include a role to

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create “deliberative spaces” to build understanding and capacity for action over time (Moser and Tribbia 2006; Vogel et al. 2007). We also argue that establishing an ongoing local science-policy exchange, and more generally deliberative-analytic capacity, is one core activity that national and/or regional governments could help to organize and fund to establish a stable institutional setting and support for more cost-effective and timely local adaptation decisions.

4.1 Boundary organizations for adaptation: examples This section takes a closer look at alternative models of “boundary organizations” as an essential part of the toolbox to support urban adaptation planning. It considers these in a multilevel governance context. We briefly examine four different examples: •

•

•

•

9 See

New York City Climate Change Program, the adaptation part of which is based on a science-policy collaborative exchange that has operated in various forms for about a decade and has successfully co-produced scientific assessments (NRC 2009; NYC 2007, 2010; Rosenzweig et al. 2007).9 Despite the bottom-up nature of the collaborative, it has drawn extensively on prior work conducted at the national level, notably on the knowledge and the network of experts that was created through an US national assessment effort (NRC 2009; Rosenzweig et al.

2007; USNAST 2001).

Ouranos is a Quebecois regional science-policy boundary organization that was created in 2001 through an initiative of the provincial government of Quebec, Hydro-Quebec (a publicly owned power generation and distribution company) and other regional partners (e.g. academic institutions). It aims to develop and use climate change knowledge to inform local and regional decisions on adaptation (Ouranos 2008, 2010; Vescovi et al. 2007).

Club ViTeCC, is a French organization that was launched in 2008 by the Mission Climat of Caisse des Dépôts (CDC, a national institutional investment bank that also manages public infrastructure investment), in cooperation with two French organizations—Météo-France and the French National Observatory on Climate Change Impacts (ONERC). Focused on cities, territories and climate change, Club ViTeCC’s main objective is to provide local authorities, stakeholders, private and public sectors and citizens with information on their role in climate change mitigation and adaptation (APREC 2008; CDC 2008).

UKCIP is one of the older institutions reviewed here, having been created in 1997 to help co-ordinate scientific climate change impacts research into the UK, and to help organizations—including but not limited to local authorities—to understand and adapt to impacts (UKCIP 2001, 2005, 2008). UKCIP is not a producer of scientific information but a user: it works as an advisor mediating between scientists and other technical experts on the one hand, and policy makers and stakeholders on the other, to co-ordinate and influence climate research and to share the useful outputs with stakeholders (McKenzie Hedger et al. 2006; LCCP 2002, 2005, 2007).

also Hunt and Watkiss, this volume.

Geographic scope and key functions, goals

Science producers or users/source of expertise

Deliberative-analytic practice/ adaptation outcomes?

Funding source and host institution (in the case of ongoing institutional capacity)

New York City Climate Large urban scale: New York City Producers/Sources of Direct interaction between Funding sources Change Protgrame Develop useable local scientific expertise: local authorities and decisionPublic and private sectors: (and its predecessor knowledge Urban governmental makers and scientists (users New York City government activities) (1)—late Co-ordinate inter-disciplinary authorities and agencies and producers). Local authorities departments (e.g. water 1990s research focused on NYC Local and national commission and frame research authority) climate risk assessment universities–scientific questions in consultation with Foundations via university and planning community scientific community research functions Help decision makers to Local adaptation outcomes: integrate adaptation to Multi-pronged adaptation agenda climate change into urban under development in NYC decisions region—not yet a full adaptation plan but a time bound process in place to set goals and monitor progress Ouranos (2)—2001 Regional: Québec, Canada Producers/sources of Original scientific research on Funding sources Develop knowledge expertise: regional climatology, impact Public and private sectors (about Co-ordinate multidisciplinary Federal agencies assessment and adaptation as$12 M/year—core budget) initiatives Local and national sessment, benefiting from consulGovernment of Quebec Help decision makers to universities tation with “user” communities Valorisation-Recherche integrated adaptation to National research centers (local and regional government, Quebec climate change into their Ouranos’ own technical regional businesses partners) Hydro-Québec decision processes and scientific staff Local adaptation outcomes: Host institution: Ouranos—a Guidance document for local self-standing institution governments to plan adaptation

Example institutions and date of origin

Table 3 Examples of different institutional models for boundary organizations to support local adaptation decisions

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National: French local authorities Users/sources of expertise: Direct interaction between local Funding sources and key business stakeholders Private/public services authorities and decision-makers Public (see below) and private for local infrastructure National meteorological and scientists (users and Contributions from private Provide information to stakecenter producers). However users do sector participants holders, institutions and National and international not frame the analytical work Host institution: private sector on their roles in universities and it is not location specific Caisse des Dépôts climate change adaptation Local, national and Local adaptation outcomes: Météo France Rethink the infrastructureinternational experts Advice to local governments and ONERC related decision-making business partners on priorities process for adaptation—no specific Make scientific and technical adaptation plans or action information understandable oriented outcomes to date to local decision makers and developing the proper decision tools National: United Kingdom Users/sources of expertise: Direct, location specific interaction Funding sources localities Oxford University Center between local authorities and Public & local resources (about Develop and communicate for the Environment decision-makers and scientists 1.25 M/year—funding individual scale relevant information Tyndall Center (users and producers). Local assessments raised locally) on climate change impacts to Research groups within authorities commission and UK Department for stakeholders, including but universities across the frame research questions in Environment, Food not limited to local authorities UK consultation with scientific and Rural Affairs Provide policy-making tools to Private laboratories community UK’s Knowledge Transfer decision makers Local adaptation outcomes: Partnership scheme Establish on-going relationSignificant uptake and adaptation Host institution: ships between researchers planning occurring in key urban Oxford University and decision makers areas e.g. London

Compiled by authors from various sources as follows: (1) New York City: NRC (2009), NYC (2010), Rosenzweig et al. (2007), see also: www.nyc.gov/PlaNYC2030; (2) UKCIP: McKenzie Hedger et al. (2006), UKCIP (2005, 2008), see also: http://www.ukcip.org.uk/; (3) Ouranos : Ouranos (2008, 2010), Vescovi et al. (2007); see also: http://www.ouranos.ca/; (4) Club ViTeCC: APREC (2008), CDC (2008); see also http://www.caissedesdepots.fr/en/activity/fighting-against-climatechange/research-on-the-economics-of-climate-change.html and http://www.cdcclimat.com/index_en.html

UKCIP—United Kingdom Climate Impact Programme (3)—1997

Club ViTeCC— Villes, Territoires et Changement Climatique (4)— 2008

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These examples were selected to span a range of bottom-up versus top-down institutional models where the origin of the government support for the organization differs (i.e. locally driven, sub-nationally or regionally driven, or nationally driven).

Table 3 highlights several key features: i) governmental and other institutional functions with an emphasis on multilevel governance characteristics (including the role of funding); ii) key actors—i.e. engagement of different actors in the production and use of scientific information and assessment and more generally in deliberativeanalytic practice to link technical assessments to adaptation planning and decisions; iii) adaptation planning outcomes, such as the development and use of specific tools and methods, adaptation plans or planning processes.10 4.2 Discussion These examples demonstrate broad variation in their geographic scope as well as institutional features such as proximity to “local” clients, levels of organization and sources of funding. All four organizations have a common feature of attempting to provide a boundary organization function to inform decision-making through provision of credible, legitimate and salient scientific and technical assessment. They all practice some form of analytic-deliberation with analysis developed in consultation with a mix of sub-national and local governmental and non-governmental actors.

Ouranos, Club ViTeCC, and the UK are essentially public–private partnerships and thus are examples of multilevel and multi-scale institutions. This organizational structure demonstrates the explicit and growing interest in the private sector to identify, understand and carefully manage the business and investment risks presented by a changing climate.

In addition, the organizations have different ways of interacting with the expert community, i.e. acting either as “producers” or as “users” of new scientific information. In only one instance is the boundary organization actually producing the science in locally relevant scientific assessment (i.e. Ouranos). Instead, the relevant scientific work can be usefully carried out or commissioned from research communities or universities based in the region or location of assessment. This allows the “boundary organization” to focus on facilitating the interaction between user and producer communities, and to help package or translate information in a non-technical, user friendly manner so as to better reach the policy community and other decisionmakers (e.g. business or households).

Communication strategies are also important in the effort to understand and reflect about climate change and will benefit from the use of image and metaphor to connect climate change to local geography and culture along side of good science and expert analysis (Corfee-Morlot 2009; Leiserowitz 2005; Moser 2006a; Moser and Dilling 2006; Vogel et al. 2007). Information on climate change impacts provides a means for lay people to understand and “care” about the issue and participate

10 It is beyond the scope of this paper to conduct an in-depth review or analysis of these organizations.

A more in-depth assessment could yield additional insights. In particular it would be interesting to explore perceptions and understandings of the effectiveness of these different organizational approaches to compare performance from the perspective of local participants and decision-makers and to explore why some of these organizations have been comparatively more effective in influencing adaptation decisions.

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in efforts to respond. It brings the abstract and distant problem of climate change into a local context and helps people—investors and consumers alike—to relate it to their daily lives and think about how to address it. Some of the institutional models explicitly include a communication function in their design (e.g. UKCIP and Ouranos) whereas others do not.

This review demonstrates the value of framing local science-policy assessment around themes that are identified by affected stakeholders, to deepen knowledge and promote strategies for adaptation that resonate from the bottom up (Moser 2006b).

Equally, there is a need to couple impact assessment with technically sound economic analysis of response options, i.e. to examine the local costs and benefits of different adaptation options. Adaptation will also be generated through a multitude of private and public sector decisions to invest differently than today to manage the risks of climate change, such as on choice of location and investment in built infrastructure (Fankhauser et al. 2008). These decisions represent different entry points for policy and both scientific and economic assessment can inform decisions about how to design such policies.

Where adaptation strategies have an immediate cost, they will be accepted only if climate change and its impacts are well understood by the population. For instance, banning urban development today where climate change may increase future risk levels will be strongly opposed in the absence of a wide consensus on the need to reduce vulnerability to future climate change (see the recent and unsuccessful French experience to use expert knowledge alone to justify a strategic retreat from highrisk areas following the coastal floods caused by the storm Xynthia).11 Similarly, it may be desirable to elevate houses that may be at risk of flood in the future or by building houses that are more resilient to high temperature events, thus incurring increased construction costs. Such increases in construction costs have to be justified through detailed information on the benefits that the population can expect should such policies be implemented. Climate change information, therefore, needs to be tailored to local context and communicated as widely as possible, and not only to decision-makers, to make it possible to implement the most efficient policies.

Yet this review suggests that boundary organizations have typically been designed with limited capacity at best to layer in economic assessment of adaptation. In the examples examined, only Club ViTeCC and UKCIP appear to have begun to fully integrate economic assessment. Instead the focus has been largely on getting the “science” right, despite the equally challenging economic dimension of adaptation decisions.

In looking at how to expand on these examples to provide more systemic support for local decision-makers, it is important to ask the question of who should pay to support the research component of deliberative-analytic work on climate change.

Funding for such work could usefully come from either national or regional (subnational) governments, with the intent to support adaptation decisions across all major urban regions in an entire nation or sub-national region (NRC 2009). As noted above, funding may also come from private sector actors or local authorities themselves (resources permitting) who are keen to have up-to-date local information on which to base long-lasting investment decisions. However, given the public good

11 See

“Après Xynthia, Oléron ne décolère pas”, Le Monde, April 14, 2010.

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aspects of the climate change problem, and the fact that local governments may not understand why it is in their interest to be concerned about climate change, there is a strong argument to centrally co-fund such research and information, at least at the outset. Even in the case of the NYC program, central support was provided indirectly through the US national assessment, which was conducted with strong engagement of local and regional stakeholders and had established lasting epistemic networks on which local and regional authorities could eventually build.

Importantly, both the New York City program and the UKCIP have succeeded in facilitating key outcomes in the form of urban adaptation plans or planning processes. The varied success of these boundary organizations to influence local level adaptation decisions may be at least in part due to their different structures, working modes (i.e. proximity to local partners), mandates and sources of funding.

Both NYC and UKCIP are to a large extent locally driven as they rely upon specific local framing, mandates and to some extent funding to support relevant scientific assessment. By contrast, ViTeCC and Ouranos have significantly more centralized funding and autonomy, and as a result their existence is not dependent on the development of close working relationships or contracts with local partners.

This raises another important question: what is the most appropriate scale at which to organize deliberative-analytic processes, including scientific-policy assessment capacity, to support adaptation decision-making over time? While the New York City example appears to have delivered impressive results in the form of a strong process to integrate adaptation within local sustainability planning for a mega-city location, it may not be widely replicable elsewhere. This is because it is a model that requires significant local resources, interest and technical capacity—features that may not exist in many other cities across the world today. Also, there will be important economies of scale to developing science-policy capacity at the subnational scale such that it serves multiple cities and localities within a given region.

There is thus an economic argument in favor of centralized support for capacity to facilitate or coordinate assessment while also prioritizing the development of analytic-deliberation in location specific contexts.

The evidence suggests that boundary work can usefully facilitate partnerships and collaborative networks to co-produce local science policy assessments. Such work may also aim to launch local networks to coordinate relevant local support functions (if they do not already exist), partnerships that could eventually design, help to implement and monitor local action plans. The examples of greater London and New York, show that tailoring analysis to questions and needs of a single (greater) urban area, when combined with local leadership and strong local demand for such information, yields adaptation results. Ultimately the effectiveness of such boundary organizations may depend upon developing lasting relationships with local authorities and other local and regional partners and stakeholders to support an iterative analytic-deliberative local policy process over time.12

12 See also Vogel et al. (2007) for an interesting discussion of nodes of connectivity and “complex labyrinths of communication and engagement.”

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5 Conclusion Despite a flurry of recent activity in cities on climate change and growing interest in the research community, the basic tools and scale relevant information to facilitate good decision-making in urban contexts are still lacking, and urban adaptation policy remains weak and fragmented. Urban climate policy is also largely decoupled from national policy frameworks, even if local authority to act is necessarily nested in the authority of national and/or sub-national regional governments. In most cases, national governments have only just begun to take notice of the importance of city authorities in their efforts to advance adaptation policy.

Urban risk governance processes are central to our efforts to understand, communicate, act to limit vulnerability and adapt to climate change. Climate change cannot remain a specialist issue; it needs to become a community issue, along with safe streets, clean air, a strong economy and good schools. A key to good local decisionmaking is civic engagement and understanding about the issue of climate change as well as credible, legitimate and salient science-policy assessment. Understanding climate change in local contexts, in turn, will bring political support for action, local know-how and ideas about how to address it to the table. It will also lead to more serious efforts to develop local climate response plans, helping to gather experience and learn, such that successful approaches can be refined and more widely disseminated.

Urban governance of climate change offers a number of unique advantages in the design and implementation of responses. These include: i) the ability to work closely with local stakeholders and in context specific ways to make climate change more tractable for decision makers; ii) the possibility to incorporate climate change into reform of pre-existing local policies and practices (e.g. land use and urban planning); and iii) the ability to experiment with and learn about a range of possible responses to cost-effectively adapt to inevitable climate changes.

This paper develops a multilevel climate risk governance framework to consider how to better support urban decision-making on adaptation. It suggests the need to design policy processes across levels of government to enable and learn from successful local action over time. In particular, there is value in explicitly examining how different levels of government, types of actors and institutions and tools enable or limit local capacity to adapt to climate change.

Within this multilevel risk governance framework, the paper examines the role of science-policy assessment, the use of analytic-deliberative approaches, and “boundary organizations” as an essential part of the toolbox to support urban adaptation planning. It reviews several institutional examples that provide such services to local authorities. These examples reveal a number of common features, including the creation of local epistemic networks, which draw on regional and local research institutions, and direct engagement with local businesses and other key stakeholders.

We have argued that one priority action is for national or sub-national regional governments to empower city authorities by providing institutional support for the development of credible, legitimate and salient (e.g. scale relevant) science-policy assessment and deliberative-analytic processes. National and regional governments are well placed to help create the technical and institutional capacity needed for this. They can provide both financial and technical support to establish “boundary organizations” that have a mandate to work with local communities and urban

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authorities. These organizations will ideally be inter-disciplinary to also ensure the application of relevant economic and communication tools in local deliberativeanalytic processes. However, advancing adaptation decisions may hinge upon a close coupling of science assessment to the needs of local partners and an iterative backand-forth between these users and producers of any assessment in a deliberativeanalytic process. Thus this review also suggests there may be large benefits in establishing access to these tools within a single “boundary organization” with nodes of access and activity established at the even more local level.

Given the long start up times, national or regional governments will need to act start today to ensure that urban authorities have access to the information and resources required for good adaptation decisions. While the agenda for multilevel governance of climate change is inevitably much broader than this, these first steps by national governments or sub-national governments to work with city authorities in this way could boost adaptation policy. If tackled today, the creation of enabling national and regional policy frameworks could help to carry cities forward to deliver on the promise of climate protection over the decades to come.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Susanne Moser and an anonymous reviewer for commenting on this article. The views presented here represent those of the authors alone and do not represent those of the OECD or its Member Countries.

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