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Local Knowledge Co-production, Emergent Climate Adaptation Publics and Regional Experimentalist Governance: An Institutional Design Case Study

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Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Strategies for Coastal Communities

Part of the book series: Climate Change Management ((CCM))

Abstract

In this paper, we ask how are climate hazards, local knowledge, affects and political arrangements assembled and generated by co-productive adaptation planning? Additionally, we ask how climate change preparedness comes to articulate and embody social imaginaries of the future and the governance arrangements these call forth. Using a paradigmatic case study from New Brunswick, Canada, we ask how the material dynamics of climate change impacts and local knowledge co-production in community-based adaptation planning are constitutive of the formation of “climate adaptation publics”? Our chapter argues that current governance arrangements are not adequate to the task of empowering and coordinating emerging climate adaptation publics, and keeping different levels of climate adaptation decision-making transparent, adaptive and accountable. We propose an institutional design based on an experimentalist form of regional adaptation governance to support climate adaptation publics and derive insights from this case study to inform regional adaptation governance more generally. This article also makes a theoretical contribution to non-extractive conceptions of local knowledge mobilization in climate change adaptation governance.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council Partnership Development Grant # 605512 (2013–2015): “Living with Climate Change: Mapping Experiences and Adaptation in the Global South and North to X and X. The authors are also thankful for the financial support of the New Brunswick Government Environmental Trust Fund granted to Kim Reeder for the CCCVA study.

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Correspondence to Nicole Lisa Klenk .

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Klenk, N.L., MacLellan, J.I., Reeder, K., Flueraru, D. (2018). Local Knowledge Co-production, Emergent Climate Adaptation Publics and Regional Experimentalist Governance: An Institutional Design Case Study. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Strategies for Coastal Communities. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70703-7_14

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