(Un)paving the Way to Climate Adaptation

Abstract: The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible and will have detrimental impacts on society’s health and safety, ecosystems and the economy, especially at the local scale. As a response, municipalities all over the world are setting up climate adaptation strategies, as is also the case in the Netherlands. However, many of the proposed measures require action not only on public but also on private land. Therefore, it is recognised that stakeholders play an important role in the creation of a climate-resilient society and should be engaged in several phases of the climate adaptation process. As literature on this topic is scarce, this thesis aims to better understand how this stakeholder engagement can take form. A case study of the municipality of Nieuwegein (the Netherlands) was conducted and barriers and drivers to take climate adaptive action for various stakeholders were identified through a content analysis of 14 interviews and three documents. This was done for the three phases of the adaptation process: understanding; planning; and managing. The results demonstrate that there are many interlinked barriers and drivers and that they vary depending on the seven identified stakeholder groups and the phases of the process. Subsequently, an adaptive governance framework was developed, where three main features were integrated: flexibility in the form of different governance modes; participation based on representativeness, communication and authority of participants; and learning as single-, double- and triple-loop learning throughout the process. With the help of the framework, the identified barriers and drivers were used to develop interventions points in each phase of the adaptation process for each stakeholder group. Although the results are context-specific, they show that by being aware of the needs of different stakeholder groups and understanding how adaptive governance can respond to that, local governments can find different ways to engage stakeholders to (un)pave the way to a climate-resilient society.