Climate Adaptation at the Local Scale: Using Federal Climate Adaptation Policy Regimes to Enhance Climate Services

Charles Herrick and Jason Vogel
Additional contact information
Charles Herrick: Washington Center, New York University, Washington, DC 20016, USA
Jason Vogel: Climate Impacts Group (CIG), University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 13, 1-20

Abstract: This paper is an interpretive reanalysis of 17 in-depth case studies of community-based climate adaptation sponsored by the Kresge Foundation between 2014–2016. Drawing from the political science and international relations literature, we use the policy regime construct to characterize U.S. federal policies and programs that drive and enable climate adaptation at the local scale. While the regime construct has been used to evaluate the international governance of climate change mitigation, it has not been used in the context of climate adaptation. We find that numerous federal policies are used by localities to pursue adaptation objectives. We find that local adaptation initiatives based on federal policy tend to be non-prescriptive, are situational in their application, utilize common policy tools, and adopt a de-centered mode of governance. While a truly sustainable and resilient society may entail fundamental “transformation”, we suggest that such a paradigm shift might be constructively cultivated through the blueprint laid out in the 17 case studies examined here—using existing know-how and tools. Based on our analysis and characterization of a federal climate adaption policy regime, we propose that the enterprise of climate services may need to move beyond existing models of co-production to embrace an ‘apprenticeship’ model, immersing technical information providers in the milieu of policy and governance in order that they might learn to recognize factors that influence the applicability, usefulness, and uptake of climate products and services.

Keywords: climate change; climate services; adaptation; policy regime; governance; local; co-production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/13/8135/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/13/8135/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:13:p:8135-:d:855111

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().