Abstract
As mitigation will not likely be sufficient to hinder climate change, adaptation to the consequences of climate change will be needed. The impacts of climate change will include such phenomena as increased flooding and sea level rise, which will in turn have significant effects on densely populated and infrastructurally-developed areas in advanced industrial states. Despite the potential for serious consequences, very little of the existing climate change adaptation literature has focused on adaptation in the EU or the industrialised world in general. This chapter and the volume at large address this gap. This chapter describes the governance system of public and private actors and bodies that set the context for adaptive capacity at local, regional, national and EU levels, and argues that adaptive capacity can largely be seen as related to the resource distribution and prioritisation processes within such systems. The chapter further outlines the comparative approach taken by the volume, including a common methodology for the presented multi-level studies.
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- 1.
Similar mechanisms are also present in theories of governmentality, which note that specific mentalities may govern the selection of programmes and instruments to regulate particular fields (cf. Rose, 1996; Keskitalo, Juhola, & Westerhoff, in prep). In relation to policy style literature, Wurzel (2002) adds that sectoral and sub-sectoral differences will also influence the regulation of environmental issues (e.g., within different branches of government).
- 2.
Resilience can broadly be defined as the possibility for a system to be able to absorb disturbances while still retaining its basic functions (cf. Walker & Salt, 2006). Resilience is thereby related to adaptive capacity.
- 3.
Institutions are also seen as an independent factor in some descriptions of adaptive capacity (e.g., Smit & Pilifosova, 2001), but are discussed here within a multi-level governance and political context. Resources related to knowledge and skills or human resources (Smit & Pilifosova, 2001, Eakin & Lemos, 2006) can be seen as integrated both in this category and in other categories.
- 4.
New public management is generally defined by the integration of a number of neo-liberal measures, including, according to Torres and Pina (2004): ‘downsizing, privatisation, accountability for performance, replacement of input control by output control, accrual accounting, performance measurement, decentralisation, corporatisation, contracting-out, competition, management devolution’ as well as empowerment of citizens and employees and the separation of politics and administration (p. 450).
- 5.
For instance, Bull and Rhodes (2007) describe Italy as a country that has retained a number of ‘features common to the “southern type” of politics – described by Sapelli (1995, p. 18) as “collusion, a lack of sense of state and the ubiquity of clannish parties” with a weak embrace of the Weberian concept of “belief in law”’ (quoted in Bull & Rhodes, 2000, p. 658).
- 6.
However, Spain has retained specific local and regional features and lacks the legally unitary base of the other countries, while Italy exhibits strong regional differences. Greece draws upon Germanic legal traditions but has an administrative approach similar to the Napoleonic group (Newman & Thornley, 1996).
- 7.
Transnational regions may also exist, such as those often described in the term ‘a Europe of Regions’ (cf. Paasi, 2002); however, the transnational regional context will not be treated here.
- 8.
Quaglia and Radaelli note that Europeanisation can be defined as ‘processes of (a) construction, (b) diffusion and (c) institutionalisation of norms, beliefs, formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” that are first defined and then consolidated in the EU policy processes and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and sub-national) discourse, political structures, and public policies’ (Radaelli, 2003, p. 30, quoted in Quaglia & Radaelli, 2007, p. 925).
- 9.
For instance, Quaglia and Radaelli (2007) note that in order to produce effects in terms of Europeanisation, interactions at the EU level must ‘become a reference point in domestic political action, either via socialisation or the production of resources and policies that modify the logic of political interaction at home’ (p. 925).
- 10.
As the selection of local cases was based on policy literature as well as limited in the numbers of local authorities that could be included in the study, this has in some cases (notably the UK) meant that not all potentially relevant local authorities could be included.
- 11.
In some cases, several people were interviewed together at the main interviewee’s request; in these cases, multiple participants are still treated as a single interview.
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Keskitalo, E.C.H. (2010). Introduction – Adaptation to Climate Change in Europe: Theoretical Framework and Study Design. In: Keskitalo, E. (eds) Developing Adaptation Policy and Practice in Europe: Multi-level Governance of Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9325-7_1
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