Robbert Biesbroek

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Public Administration and Policy Group

Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels, including climate change, food insecurity, terrorism, and the instability of financial markets. Public policy scholars have recently suggest...

Decision makers need better insights about solutions to accelerate adaptation efforts. Defining the concept of solution space and revealing the forces and strategies that influence this space will enable decision makers to define pathways for adaptation action. .

Understanding how climate change adaptation is integrated into existing policy sectors and organizations is critical to ensure timely and effective climate actions across multiple levels and scales. Studying climate change adaptation policy has become increasingly difficult, particularly given the increasing volume of potentially relevant data avai...

Policy integration is considered an important mode to govern cross-cutting policy problems effectively. In the context of climate change adaptation, calls for strengthened policy integration have recently emerged to ensure timely, adequate and effective actions. Though research on climate change adaptation policy integration is still in its infancy...

Over the past 30 years countries across the globe have developed and implemented policies and measures on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV). This paper empirically explores whether and how policy attention around climate change IAV has shifted over time and across regions. We use structural topic modelling to analyse the m...

This article provides a stocktake of the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how adaptation responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate events. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive (41%) characteri...

A scientific consensus acknowledges that climate change has increased wildfire activity in the Russian Arctic, a trend projected to continue in response to further warming. Regional governments across Russia have started to design and develop adaptation policies and plans (i.e. outputs) to this end. Our comprehensive understanding on the state of w...

This article provides a stocktake the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate impacts. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive characteristics (41%), as wel...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, emerged in late 2019, halfway through the preparation of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report. This Cross-Chapter Box assesses how the massive shock of the pandemic and response measures interact with climate-related impacts and risks as well as its significan...

The success of climate services for adaptation to climate change is increasingly studied, but there exists a varying understanding of what climate services are and what makes them successful. This study systematically mapped the breadth and depth of peer-reviewed literature on the subject and synthesized evidence on what we know, don’t know and nee...

The Netherlands is internationally renowned for its flood risk management, but three consecutive dry years between 2018–2020 fuelled the debate on how to deal with future drought risk. Drought governance in the Netherlands is still in its infancy. The increased sense of urgency has led many scholars and policy makers to call for transitions towards...

Background — Countries around the globe have started implementing policies to respond to the current and future risks of climate change. The scientific literature on these adaptation policies is fragmented and no central typology is generally accepted, making tracking of global adaptation policy progress difficult. Methods — In this protocol, we de...

For several decades, stakeholder engagement in climate change decision-making has been well chronicled. Recently there have been renewed calls for governments to be agents of climate change policy innovation. However, an overlooked actor is the bureaucracy, particularly the degree of autonomy in relation to elected politicians. This paper argues th...

The Paris Agreement encourages countries to monitor and regularly report on progress in responding to the impacts of climate change. So far, discussions on adaptation tracking have focused on the technocratic reasons for limited progress on adaptation tracking, for example, financial, methodological, and technical capacity gaps. Substantial variati...

The livelihood of many farmers across the globe is affected by climate variability and change. Providing weather and seasonal climate information is expected to support farmers to make adaptive farming decisions. Yet, for many farmers, scientific forecast information provided remains unreliable for decision-making. Scholars have called for the need...

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation,...

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthe...

Organising effective policy coordination has become a key principle of EU policymaking in recent decades. Within the European Commission, interservice consultations (ISCs) play an important role to coordinate between the different directorate-generals. In spite of this importance, ISCs have so far not been analysed in a systematic way. This paper a...

Climate change adaptation responses are being developed and delivered in many parts of the world in the absence of detailed knowledge of their effects on public health. Here we present the results of a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature reporting the effects on health of climate change adaptation responses in low- and middle-income count...

Despite the proliferation of power approaches to study climate change, there is little focus on how to deal with the negative effects of power in climate change adaptation (CCA) policy-making. CCA literature provides little insight into understandings of manifestations of power that can create negative effects, especially in the context of South As...

European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to increase in the future. These mountain regions experience rapid changes, which influence social-ecological systems in the lower-mountain and floodplain regions of Europe. There is scattered evidence across different strands of academic literature on the...

Sea level rise (SLR) is projected to have severe consequences for people and assets in European coastal areas. Planning for SLR is a critical step to ensure timely and adequate responses. Despite our rapidly increasing understanding of SLR impacts and the need to adapt, few studies have looked at how countries are planning for SLR. We surveyed expe...

Coordinating and integrating different policies and public sector organizations is a major challenge for practitioners and a continuing topic of interest for researchers. We argue that existing research on this topic needs reorientation to provide better insights for practice and theory of policymaking as well as policy implementation. We offer fou...

We present the first systematic, global stocktake of the academic literature on human adaptation. We screen 48,316 documents and identify 1,682 articles that present empirical research documenting human efforts to reduce risk from climate change and associated hazards. Coding and synthesizing this literature highlights that the overall extent of ad...

Recent literature suggests that direct national access to multilateral climate funds could promote climate change adaptation investment that focuses more on the needs of vulnerable local communities when compared to indirect access through multilateral agencies. However, there has been no systematic comparative assessment of the level of community...

There are strong calls to integrate scientific and indigenous forecasts to help farmers adapt to climate variability and change. Some studies used qualitative approaches to investigate indigenous people's techniques for forecasting weather and seasonal climate. In this study, we demonstrate how to quantitatively collect indigenous forecast and conn...

Rice farmers in Northern Ghana are susceptible to climate variability and change with its effects in the form of drought, water scarcity, erratic rainfall and high temperatures. In response, farmers resort to weather and seasonal forecast to manage uncertainties in decision-making. However, there is limited empirical research on how forecast lead t...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal response will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal responses will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal response will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Adaptation to impacts of climate change is a key pillar of climate change policy, and local governments have historically played a major role in the design and implementation of these policies. An array of political, economic, institutional, social, and individual factors influence adaptation policy instrument choice. At the local government level,...

Climate change is currently impacting cultural heritage globally. Despite advances in the understanding of the relationship between climate change impacts and cultural heritage, there are significant barriers that hamper adaptation of cultural heritage to current and projected climate risks. This paper aims to advance the empirical understanding of...

With climate change impacts being felt across Europe, governments have started to invest in designing and implementing adaptation actions. The means through which governments adapt is generally referred to as policy instruments. Although there is a large body of adaptation policy literature emerging, our comprehensive understanding of policy instru...

There is much scholarly and policy interest in the role that international finance could play in closing the financing gap for community adaptation initiatives. Despite the interest, the overall amount of international adaptation finance that has reached local recipients remains low. What makes internationally-financed climate change adaptation pro...

Many initiatives to address contemporary complex challenges require the crossing of sector, domain, and level boundaries, which policy entrepreneurs are believed to facilitate. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how, why, and with what effect such entrepreneurs operate to cross boundaries. As this requires an account of both entreprene...

Comparative research on climate change adaptation policy struggles with robust conceptualization and measurement of adaptation policy. Using a policy mixes approach to address this challenge, we characterize adaptation policy based on a general model of how governments govern issues of societal interest. We argue that this approach allows for conte...

This study aims to disentangle the concept of meta-governance by systematically reviewing 79 articles. By investigating the who, what, why, and how of meta-governance, this article paints a detailed picture of its empirical manifestation. We conclude that the literature could benefit from better conceptualization and operationalization. From the re...

The Paris Agreement and Katowice Climate Package articulate a clear mandate for all parties to undertake and document adaptation progress. Yet persistent challenges have prevented substantive developments in tracking adaptation and the assessment of adaptation actions and their outcomes. Here, we provide an overview of the challenges of adaptation...

The concept of wicked problems has served as an inspiration for research in a variety of research fields but has also contributed to conceptual confusion through the various ways in which it has been defined and used. In this special issue, a number of ontological, theoretical and methodological issues are discussed. First, while its use as a buzzw...

Rapid growth over the past two decades in digitized textual information represents untapped potential for methodological innovations in the adaptation governance literature that draw on machine learning approaches already being applied in other areas of computational social sciences. This Focus Article explores the potential for text mining techniq...

The European Union (EU) is a supranational entity for which climate change adaptation has become an important policy topic. This chapter seeks to address the question of how the EU currently governs climate change adaptation. The authors show how the open method of coordination as governing logic offers the possibility for the European Commission t...

Municipalities worldwide are confronted with the need to take long-term decisions about ageing water infrastructure in the face of unpredictable future developments. Previous studies on long-term decision making have proposed solutions targeted at the domain of either politics or planning. This study combines insights from the domains of policy, po...

On 9 October 2018, the Civil Division of the The Hague Court of Appeal in the Netherlands has delivered its judgment on the appeal of the ‘Urgenda case’ The Court imposed an order to act on the Dutch government to adjust its policy from 20% to achieve a 25% emission reduction by 2020, compared to 1990 levels (paras 51 and 75). The judgment confirme...

This article shows how Bangladesh and India intentionally maintain the status quo for the Brahmaputra River at the transboundary level, using material and ideational resources. Results show that India wants to reduce its hegemonic vulnerabilities and Bangladesh aims to maintain its control over the Brahmaputra river, simultaneously building its tec...

Many climate change adaptation scholars recognise the complexities in the governance of adaptation. Most have used the concept of ‘barriers to adaptation’ in an attempt to describe why governance of adaptation is challenging. However, these studies have recently been critiqued for over simplifying complex governance processes by referring to the st...

Local public health authorities often lack the capacity to adapt to climate change, despite being on the ‘front lines’ of climate impacts. Upper-level governments are well positioned to create an enabling environment for adaptation and build local public health authorities' capacity, yet adaptation literature has not specified how upper-level gover...

Despite recognizing the importance of public bureaucracies in governing climate change, our knowledge of how their behavioral and structural characteristics influence climate change adaptation policy is limited. This article provides an introduction to a collection of studies that seeks to explore the link between climate change adaptation and publ...

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa face many difficulties when making farming decisions due to unexpected changes in weather and climate. Access to hydro-climatic information can potentially assist farmers to adapt. This study explores the extent to which seasonal climate forecasts can meet hydro-climatic information needs of rice farmers in northern Gh...

Deliberation over how to adapt to short or long-term impacts of climate change takes place in a complex political setting, where actors’ interests and priorities shape the temporal dimension of adaptation plans, policies and actions. As actors interact to pursue their individual or collective interests, these struggles turn into dynamic power inter...

Although governments are developing and implementing policies to adapt to the impacts of climate change, it remains unclear which factors shape how states are developing these policies. This paper aims to assess whether or not administrative traditions matter for the formation of national climate change adaptation policy in 32 high-income countries...

Hydro-climatic information has a potential to improve agricultural productivity under climate variability. Recent developments in information sharing platforms (Environmental Virtual Observatories, EVOs) could make information provisioning more actionable. Here we present the results of a diagnostic study for the development of a hydro-climatic EVO...

Governing complex environmental issues involves intensive interaction between public and private actors. These governance processes are fraught with uncertainties about, for example, the current state of environmental affairs, the relevant set of decision alternatives, the reactions of other actors to proposed solutions or the future developments l...

Climate change adaptation research is dominated by in‐depth, qualitative, single‐ or small‐n case studies that have resulted in rich and in‐depth understanding on adaptation processes and decision making in specific locations. Recently, the number of comparative adaptation policy cases has increased, focusing on examining, describing, and/or explai...

Climate change is a significant threat to public health, and governments at all scales will need to adapt to protectthe health of their populations. The impacts of climate change are highly localized and thus federal systemstheoretically have the inherent advantage of allowing for regional diversity and policy experimentation inadaptation. However,...

Social learning is crucial for local smallholder farmers in developing countries to improve their adaptive capacity and to adapt to the current and projected impacts of climate change. While it is widely acknowledged that social learning is a necessary condition for adaptation, few studies have systematically investigated under which conditions par...

Climate change governance is in a state of enormous flux. New and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing around the international climate regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They appear to be emerging spontaneously from the bottom up, producing a more dispersed pattern of governing, which Nob...

We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res.47: 1567–1576, doi:10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous b...

Global collaborations across level, domain, and sector boundaries are on the rise. This article analyses policy entrepreneurship for the establishment of the Global Alliance for Climate‐Smart Agriculture (GACSA), a global multi‐actor collaboration to address climate change and foster food security and development. We explore policy entrepreneurship...

Faced with rising and irreversible impacts from climate change, a growing number of public and private stakeholders across vulnerable sectors are engaging with adaptation efforts. However, our knowledge is limited regarding the type of information being demanded to track adaptation progress at the national level. To address this gap, we conducted a...

Governments fulfil important roles in increasing the adaptive capacity of local communities to respond to climate change impacts, particularly in developing countries. Existing studies on how governments enable and constrain the ways in which local level communities learn and build their adaptive capacity, however, generally adopt network or market...

The aim of this article is to explain and compare the changes in climate policy paradigms (CPPs) of Bangladesh and Nepal. Climate policies are shaped by the underlying CPPs that refer to a dominant set of prevailing and institutionalized ideas and strategies to reduce the impacts of climate change. We focus the analysis on the timeframe between 199...