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Institutions are one of the decisive factors for climate adaptation. Nevertheless, current understanding of the institutions-adaptation-nexus is fragmented across the scientific community; is often theoretically ad-hoc or eclectic and at times contradictory. Moreover, knowledge claims are typically raised either for specific cases or overly generic, whereas a diagnostic method may be most effective for cross-case learning about institutional deficits and success factors in climate adaptation. This study develops an institutional diagnostics approach to climate adaptation by means of a systematic meta-analysis of 52 studies comprising 120 cases from Europe. The results show that maladaptation, adaptation barriers and limits are rooted in institutional deficits that can be depicted as archetypical patterns of institutional attributes. Moreover, the results reveal success factors that enabled actors to prevent, alleviate or overcome specific institutional deficits in climate adaptation. Based on this, a set of diagnostic questions is provided for future in-depth institutional analyses of adaptation. Enhancing our capacities to diagnose causes of maladaptation, adaptation barriers and limits is crucial so as to device governance arrangements that match the features of specific adaptation problems.

AbstractCan we explain barriers to adaptation of collective action to changes in the natural environment? One reason for adaptation is the impacts of climate change. Ample case study evidence shows that such adaptation is rarely a smooth process. However, generalisable patterns of how and why barriers arise remain scarce. The study adopts a collective action perspective and the archetypes approach in a meta-analysis of 26 selected publications to explain how barriers arise in specific conditions. Focusing on adaptation of water governance in river basins, the study finds 21 reappearing patterns. Less well-established patterns relate to water property rights, hydrological standards, adaptation externalities, non-climatological uncertainty and vertical coordination. Results further show how barriers impede collective action in specific ways. The paper precisely introduces the archetypes approach, and shows that reported problems in adapting collective action under climate change arise from attributes of actors and pre-existing institutions rather than biophysical characteristics.

Adaptation to the consequences of climate change has attracted increasing interest as a necessary complement to greenhouse gas mitigation. Economic approaches to climate adaptation are rarely articulated and discussed explicitly despite many benefits of such a framework-level discourse. Therefore, this article investigates how climate adaptation is framed and approached in economics and attempts to contribute to the development of economic frameworks of climate adaptation. First, the paper identifies and critically reviews four major strands of current adaptation economics: estimation of adaptation benefits and costs, strategies for adaptation, the role of markets and governments, and policy instruments for adaptation. While having their merits, serious methodical difficulties prevail. Moreover, the applied neoclassical framing seems too narrow to capture the plethora of governance challenges and normative criteria revealed in adaptation policy discourses and in the multidisciplinary adaptation literature. The second part of this article outlines an institutional economics approach to climate adaptation that addresses caveats in the current state-of-the-art and offers additional concepts to study climate adaptation. Moreover, promising methods and strategies for adaptation research are presented and future research directions suggested. Finally, the paper assesses the normative foundations of climate adaptation economics and their implications for positive adaptation research.

Many resource-rich countries face the paradoxical situation that their wealth in natural resources coincides with low economic and human development rates. To address this so-called resource curse, academics and practitioners turn their hopes to institutional quality. Yet whether, how and with what consequences institutional quality is transformed in resource curse contexts remains poorly understood, especially so at subnational levels. The most widely implemented initiative that seeks to address the resource curse through enhanced institutional quality is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). This article analyses to what extent and how the EITI transforms institutional quality at national and subnational levels in Myanmar, focusing on transparency, civil society participation and accountability. We show that many transformations go beyond the official EITI process and report. While the EITI report itself is not heavily used by civil society organisations (CSOs), the EITI process motivated CSOs to gather data and organise themselves both around and beyond EITI-related issues at subnational levels. Such participatory processes of constituting transparency improved relations between the (regional) government, CSOs and private companies, but also created new forms of in- and exclusion among civil society. While avenues opened up for CSOs to demand accountability regarding the impacts of resource extraction, the extent to which they are able to trigger action of extractive industry actors in their region remains limited. In conclusion, we argue that transformations in institutional quality are not characterised by a linear trajectory from transparency in the form of the EITI report to accountability, facilitated by civil society participation in EITI multi-stakeholder groups, as the EITI standard posits. Rather, transformations in institutional quality are characterised by spin-offs, dynamic interlinkages, trade-offs, limitations and a reinforcing cycle between participation and transparency ...

Many resource-rich countries face the paradoxical situation that their wealth in natural resources coincides with low economic and human development rates. To address this so-called resource curse, academics and practitioners turn their hopes to institutional quality. Yet whether, how and with what consequences institutional quality is transformed in resource curse contexts remains poorly understood, especially so at subnational levels. The most widely implemented initiative that seeks to address the resource curse through enhanced institutional quality is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). This article analyses to what extent and how the EITI transforms institutional quality at national and subnational levels in Myanmar, focusing on transparency, civil society participation and accountability. We show that many transformations go beyond the official EITI process and report. While the EITI report itself is not heavily used by civil society organisations (CSOs), the EITI process motivated CSOs to gather data and organise themselves both around and beyond EITI-related issues at subnational levels. Such participatory processes of constituting transparency improved relations between the (regional) government, CSOs and private companies, but also created new forms of in- and exclusion among civil society. While avenues opened up for CSOs to demand accountability regarding the impacts of resource extraction, the extent to which they are able to trigger action of extractive industry actors in their region remains limited. In conclusion, we argue that transformations in institutional quality are not characterised by a linear trajectory from transparency in the form of the EITI report to accountability, facilitated by civil society participation in EITI multi-stakeholder groups, as the EITI standard posits. Rather, transformations in institutional quality are characterised by spin-offs, dynamic interlinkages, trade-offs, limitations and a reinforcing cycle between participation and transparency within and beyond the EITI.

Many resource regimes in advanced democracies are complex rather than integrated (due to the sectoral division of labor within public administrations, the lack of transversal coordination, competition for resources, strong property rights, etc.), leading to contradictory incentives in resource management. This presentation shows how governance processes are evolving to regulate competing multifunctional water uses under climate change in Oberhasli (BE), in the Swiss Alps. Our approach combines the frameworks of Institutional Resource Regimes (IRR) and Polycentric Governance. The IRR framework stipulates that formal institutional rules – public policies and property rights – shape the leeway that is available to resource users for defining localized resource-use modalities. Polycentric governance systems are those in which political authority is dispersed amongst a range of bodies that operate in overlapping jurisdictions which are not in a hierarchical relationship to one another. Recent scholarship suggests that polycentric organization of governance has a higher capacity to deal with complex challenges arising from climate change. The project aims to analyze under which conditions polycentricity can lead to a better coordination of resource uses. We performed a detailed case study to analyze governance processes of climate change mitigation and adaptation in Switzerland. Data were collected through 22 semi-structured interviews between 2016 and 2018 and document analysis. The results show that if the number of regulations increases and if simultaneously their coherence decreases, then these constellations promotes polycentric governance. The results further show the conditions under which polycentric governance improves or not the coordination of resource uses.

AbstractThis article introduces the special issue on climate adaptation and institutions. Economic accounts of climate adaptation have stressed its collective action nature and the limitations of standard economic approaches to the matter. Governance accounts, on their part, have shown that adaptation does not always happen when it is expected. Against this background, institutional economics has the potential to shed light on those societal processes and collective mechanisms leading to and shaping adaptation (or the absence of it). The selection of articles contributing to this special issue shows that climate adaptation can indeed be explored successfully through institutional economics, and that doing so fits well within the institutional economics agenda. Some recommendations for future research are provided at the end.