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The Role of Anticipatory Governance in Local Climate Adaptation: Observations from Australia
Abstract
Anticipatory governance is emerging in the literature and practice as a form of decision-making which attempts to deal with climate change complexities and uncertainties. Underpinning the anticipatory governance approach to decision-making is a three-step process which includes future analysis, flexibility of strategies and monitoring and action. This paper adopts the anticipatory governance and its three-step approach as a framework to investigate two Australian local government adaptation initiatives. It discusses the challenges local governments face in taking the lead through anticipatory governance to address climate change adaptation in their planning efforts. The paper aims to contribute analytical insights into adaptation planning at the local scale through anticipatory governance.
... The emphasis on the integration of ecosystems through the multiple co-benefits that ecosystem services provide for other concerns, especially short-term development concerns, are also related to descriptions of current political systems and planning cycles as having tendencies to favor short-term objectives, notably economic growth, at the expense of long-term sustainability goals like ecosystem resilience (Govindarajulu 2014;Ojea 2015;Dymén and Langlais 2013;Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013;Hurlimann and March 2012). 54 It has been emphasized that the promotion of ecosystem-based adaptation creates opportunities to integrate long-term environmental sustainability with short-term concerns, such as economic growth objectives, through synergies (Dymén and Langlais 2013;Govindarajulu's 2014). ...
... This problem representation is based on articulations not specifically focused on the integration of ecosystem dynamics. However, like some of those articulations, articulations representing the neglect for future uncertainties as a 'problem' of deficient integration stress that it is crucial to enhance adaptability for an uncertain future (Walker et al. 2013;Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013), as expressed in the following passage: ...
... Accordingly, it is stressed that making precise and adequate predictions of a probable future scenario is unrealistic and unattainable and that there is a need for practices advancing adaptation measures that reduce climate risks in many possible future scenarios (making them robust) and that can be modified when unexpected changes occur (making them flexible or adaptive). This is contrasted to planning and decision-support practices that are based on optimality in relation to the most 'probable' scenario (Walker et al. 2013;Dessai at el 2009;Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). ...
By describing climate change as one of the greatest challenges of our time, the Swedish government has expressed a commitment to climate change adaptation as an integral part of the country’s sustainable development efforts. Sweden has also been portrayed as a frontrunner of climate policy and sustainable development. However, research and rankings describe even the ‘good example’ of Sweden as unsustainable, including its responses to climate change. Transformation is needed.
Based on the ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, this thesis describes and problematizes conditions of ‘sustainability’ constituted through problem representations of governing climate change adaptation in Sweden. In addition, the study provides a discussion of alternative problem representations constituting conditions with new possibilities for transformation.
The empirical material for the analysis of current conditions in Sweden consists of policy documents as well as interviews with municipal and regional experts involved in promoting and implementing adaptation. I also analyze conditions constituted through problem representations in research. These are used as points of comparison for the problematization of conditions in Sweden.
My conclusions are that the current conditions of ‘sustainability’, constituted through the problem representations in Sweden, create a focus on advancing functional governance of adaptation as well as a focus on reducing marginalization of neglected sustainability concerns by integrating them with the current order of things. Problematizations of domination are largely absent. I argue that possibilities for transformation could be advanced by problematizing domination. Through problematizations of the current decentralization of responsibility, the integration imperative, and the primacy of economic growth over environmental and social dimensions of sustainability, I suggest ways in which this type of problematization could be facilitated.
... A third strand of writing that explicitly engages with the concept of anticipatory governance has emerged in sustainability science, for instance in the area of climate adaptation and resilience (Bates & Saint-Pierre, 2018;Boyd et al., 2015;Hurlbert & Gupta, 2019;Serrao-Neumann, Harman, & Low Choy, 2013). This research engages with extant notions of anticipatory governance (e.g., Fuerth, 2009b;Guston, 2014;R. ...
... This research engages with extant notions of anticipatory governance (e.g., Fuerth, 2009b;Guston, 2014;R. Quay, 2010) by seeking to provide "an alternative planning approach to address the adaptation challenge" (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013, p. 441 see also Boyd et al., 2015). ...
... The novelty lies in seeking to steer away from short-term decision-making to longer-term policy visioning in ways that can anticipate change and help realize more sustainable futures. Such perspectives also highlight the role played in anticipatory processes by local communities and a diverse array of stakeholders (Boyd et al., 2015;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013;Tschakert & Dietrich, 2010). ...
In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Much social science and sustainability science scholarship increasingly engages with the future. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of how the future is envisioned in these literatures, and with what implications for governance in the present. This article analyses these two aspects, building on the concept of “anticipatory governance.” We understand anticipatory governance to broadly mean governing in the present to adapt to or shape uncertain futures. We review perspectives within public policy, futures studies, social–ecological systems, environmental policy and governance, transition studies, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation literatures. All these literatures engage explicitly or implicitly with the notion of anticipatory governance, yet from distinct ontological and epistemological starting points. Through our review, we identify four approaches to anticipatory governance that differ with regard to (a) their conceptions of and engagement with the future; (b) their implications for actions to be taken in the present; and (c) the ultimate end to be realized through anticipatory governance. We then map onto these four approaches a diverse set of methods and tools of anticipation that each engages with. In concluding, we discuss how these four approaches provide a useful analytical lens through which to assess ongoing practices of anticipatory governance in the climate and sustainability realm.
This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
... Adapting to climate change impacts and reducing disaster risks demand proactive action from government agencies to minimise the vulnerability of human settlements (Heazle et al., 2013;Quay, 2010;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013b). As future changes and uncertainties are inherent to climate change impacts, strategic/long term planning aimed at minimising climate risks needs to deal with the variability and unpredictability of extreme weather events and their consequences. ...
... In doing so, strategies are likely to have greater ownership by the involved communities as well as being socially acceptable. Such strategies need not only have a spatial planning nature to reduce and where possible mitigate climate change impacts but also take social aspects into consideration through improved social and/or community planning (Heazle et al., 2013;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013b). ...
... First, there is significant uncertainty in terms of timing and intensity of climate change impacts as well as the response that needs to be adopted by different tiers of governments and communities to deal with such impacts (Dovers and Hezri, 2010). In fact, uncertainty related to climate science has been an impediment to proactive action in the planning sector (Camacho, 2009;Quay, 2010;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013b). Uncertainty also challenges disaster risk reduction strategies as they may require some degree of flexibility that enables them to deal with the changing profile of risks under climate change to effectively enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability (Solecki et al., 2011). ...
Recent extreme weather events worldwide have highlighted the vulnerability of many urban settlements to future climatic change. These events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity under climate change scenarios. Although the climatic change may be unavoidable, effective planning and response can reduce its impacts. Drawing on empirical data from a 3-year multi-sectoral study of climate change adaptation for human settlements in the South East Queensland region, Australia, this paper draws on multi-sectoral perspectives to propose enablers for maximising synergies between disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation to achieve improved planning outcomes. Multi-sectoral perspectives are discussed under four groups of identified enablers: spatial planning; cross-sectoral planning; social/community planning; and strategic/long term planning. Based on the findings, a framework is proposed to guide planning systems to maximise synergies between the fields of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation to minimise the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather events in highly urbanised areas.
... Anticipatory governance has emerged as a tool for climate change adaptation, which involves developing governance mechanisms that support decision-making based on future uncertainties. Several studies have examined the role of anticipatory governance in climate adaptation, focusing on the development of extreme climate change scenarios (Ruhl & Craig, 2022), approaches to anticipatory climate governance (Muiderman et al., 2020), and the role of anticipatory governance in local climate adaptation (Serrao--Neumann et al., 2013). ...
... The authors highlighted the need to consider the potential trade-offs and unintended consequences of different anticipatory governance approaches. Serrao-Neumann et al. (2013) examined the role of anticipatory governance in local climate adaptation in Australia. The authors found that anticipatory governance can support local adaptation by enabling stakeholders to anticipate potential climate impacts and develop strategies to address them. ...
This study examines the impact of climate change on women farmers' livelihoods and poverty incidence in Nigeria. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, using primary and secondary data sources to analyse the effect of climate shocks on women farmers. The study finds that women farmers in both communities are experiencing significant impacts on their livelihoods due to climate change, resulting in increased poverty incidence. The study recommends that future action plans dedicated to climate change adaptation should not be standalone. Still, it should form part of a national and sub-national strategy aimed at poverty reduction and improving livelihood, especially for women. Additionally, the paper recommends collating specific meteorological data in an inexpensive and easily understandable form and expanding extension services to ensure proper targeting of small women farmers. The study also suggests using crop diversification through a land transformation scheme to mitigate against low rainfall, with women farmers potentially serving as sharecroppers within larger farms. The paper concludes by emphasising the importance of sustaining supply and demand-driven initiatives stipulated in the plan and ensuring the political will to allocate land to women farmers. Overall, the study highlights the need for gender-sensitive policies and strategies that account for the unique vulnera-bilities of women farmers in the face of climate change, especially for future adaptation strategies.
... We also saw that the absence of learning hampered further possibilities for adapting foresight exercises to the evolving context. This barrier has notably been highlighted by Segrave et al. (2016) as a paradoxical, inverse relationship between adaptive and anticipatory qualities of a system. Relying too heavily on anticipation may lead to prescriptive long-term planning, the authors argue, hampering the capacity to adapt. ...
... Adaptive capabilities are often associated with reactive measures. However, Segrave et al. (2016) also agree that both adaptation and anticipation can function in an integrative manner. If the foresight process embraces uncertainty, then adaptive capacity would be integral to the process, underlining once again the importance of ensemble-ization. ...
Climate change effects are already being felt around the globe, and governance systems need to adapt to this new reality to foster greater resilience in social–ecological systems (SES). Anticipatory governance is a concept proposed for such a purpose. However, its definition remains rather vague in the literature, as is its practical use for decision makers. In this paper, we contribute to filling these two shortcomings.
First, we conducted a systematic literature review of the concept and derived the following main criteria: foresight, networked engagement, integration and feedback. Second, we use the identified criteria to analyse two social–ecological systems around lakes in Lower Saxony, Germany and in Quebec, Canada.
In both cases, data were generated using a participatory approach (interviews and workshops) with local stakeholders. We examined these data, identifying opportunities and barriers to anticipatory governance. Our findings support, with empirical data for the first time, the claim in the literature that ensemble‐ization—the fact that all anticipatory governance criteria must be put forward jointly and not in isolation—is a facilitator for the emergence of anticipation.
Furthermore, by highlighting opportunities and barriers to anticipatory governance within two temperate lake SES cases, we illustrate how to understand a given system's limitations with respect to anticipatory governance, as well as how to engage with the concept through concrete, already existing opportunities. The proposed course of actions could help design more anticipatory governance systems to support decision‐making processes that could enhance SES resilience.
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... Anticipatory governance emerged in Science, Technology and Innovation Foresight programmes within governments in the 1960s, with various other traditions of anticipatory governance emerging over the last half a century, including in national security policy analyses, sustainability science, and environmental governance and policy literatures (Muiderman et al., 2022;Ramos, 2014). Within sustainability sciences, anticipatory governance is used to address adaptation challenges associated with the uncertainty of climate change in contested spaces (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). ...
... Short-term political agendas do not currently provide the necessary demand for high quality long-term and future-focused knowledge on ecosystem functions (Nykvist et al., 2017). For example, analysis of anticipatory planning in Australia highlights a limited capacity of adaptation strategies to incorporate new science and practical lessons due to political interests and bias (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). Further, accounting for long-term futures is often hampered by short-term political cycles (Dewulf and Termeer, 2015), and governance systems may exclude long-term perspectives in current decision contexts (see Guillaume et al. (2017) on uncertainty as an excuse for delay). ...
Uncertain and transformative futures are faced on local to global scales because of accelerated impacts of climate change and other global drivers. Whilst some social-ecological transformations will likely be forced upon society, proactive and deliberate transformations towards more sustainable futures are possible. As such, futures-thinking and “futures methods” that can be used to anticipate and proactively engage with uncertain futures and transformative change will be increasingly essential in adaptive governance. Futures methods provide strategies and tools to explore, identify, and navigate choices when anticipating and responding to socio-political and environmental change. The chapter contributes to discussions regarding how futures-thinking relates to adaptive governance by exploring how futures methods support adaptive and transformative capacities. We propose that thinking critically, systematically, and strategically about the future is vital for adaptive governance scholarship and practice. We conclude by arguing for an expanded approach to adaptive governance, capable of confronting long-term perspectives of future uncertainty and transformative change.
... In Australia, in the face of the unpredictable impacts of climate change for which no specific policies exist, planners layered existing policies to suit specific conditions (Macintosh et al., 2015). Anticipatory governance has been proposed as a more generic approach for facing the challenges of climate adaptation (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). Then, at the more local and human scale, there is the finegrained approach of small iterations rather than planned physical change (Hamdi, 2004), ecologically inspired improvisation in political and social arenas (Xiang, 2016), and automation or citizen science, which has the potential to disrupt the status quo by opening up new spaces of contestation and activism (Gulsrud et al., 2018). ...
... The barriers the interviewees face in Western Sydney are strikingly similar to those encountered elsewhere: complicated governance structures (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013), post-political instrumental rationality in policy and planning practices (Macdonald, 2015), entrenched land use conflicts (Goodman & Douglas, 2017), the incompatibility of economic and environmental developments (Twill & Christensen, 2018), the disciplinary and compartmentalised approach to problem solving and the challenges of collaboration were all raised by the interviewees. ...
Planning systems rely on an element of certainty and can sometimes be ill-equipped to creatively adapt to increasingly complex system trajectories. We analyse how designers and planners deal creatively with a statutory planning system that is increasingly being challenged by the progressive complexity of the broader social-ecological system in which it operates. Taking Sydney, Australia, as a case study and drawing from six interviews with senior planners and designers, we explore planning barriers and the strategies used to address these barriers. While many of the strategies are useful and appropriate, what seemed more significant were some of the creative methods employed to repurpose strategies in relatively modest but more adaptive ways. We propose to refer to this as ‘hacking’ and discuss how planners and designers might successfully hack the planning system within its current (legal) boundaries.
... Others have identified more substantive barriers inherent to the methods themselves, particularly those involving more creative, or unconventional thinking, which run counter to the quantitative training of natural resource professionals (Bengston 2019). There are also substantial institutional barriers to adopting methods that inherently embrace, rather than seek to reduce, uncertainty in decision-making (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013, Bengston 2019, Pereira et al. 2019. There is often greater desire for certainty in highly politicized decisionmaking contexts than are afforded by futures thinking methods (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). ...
... There are also substantial institutional barriers to adopting methods that inherently embrace, rather than seek to reduce, uncertainty in decision-making (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013, Bengston 2019, Pereira et al. 2019. There is often greater desire for certainty in highly politicized decisionmaking contexts than are afforded by futures thinking methods (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). Moreover, participatory methods are resource intensive and can be difficult for problems that transcend geographies or scales. ...
Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.
... Local governments in Australia face the risk of litigation and legal liability if they fail to reasonably respond to climate change (e.g. approving developments in high-risk areas) (England 2008), but they are generally cautious about taking action without full support from higher levels of government (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). Important decisions such as inclusion of sea level rise considerations in planning are left to local councils and consequent local level responses are either in an "ad-hoc and incremental fashion", varying significantly (Byrne et al. 2009, 147, Gero et al. 2012 or occur in the absence of any top-down direction from state and national levels or peer examples (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). ...
... approving developments in high-risk areas) (England 2008), but they are generally cautious about taking action without full support from higher levels of government (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). Important decisions such as inclusion of sea level rise considerations in planning are left to local councils and consequent local level responses are either in an "ad-hoc and incremental fashion", varying significantly (Byrne et al. 2009, 147, Gero et al. 2012 or occur in the absence of any top-down direction from state and national levels or peer examples (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). In their study of local government policies across three States (Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia), Kellett et al. (2015) suggest that the practice of cascading strategic top down policy to lower levels of government leaves limited opportunity for local policy initiatives on climate change. ...
Climate change will increase the intensity, duration and/or frequency of some climate-related hazards. Responsibility for adapting to such impacts of climate change in Australia has, in the main, fallen on local governments which have paid varying degrees of attention to the issue. This paper takes an integrated approach to compare the climate adaptation and disaster resilience policies and plans of local governments of two low-lying coastal cities in Australia to understand whether (and how) local governments can make a difference. The findings indicate that local governments can significantly contribute to building resilience and adapting to climate-related hazards, however a number of factors such as the attitudes of local governments on climate change, environmental activism, and the recent experiences of climate-related disasters are instrumental for shaping a better local response. Local action also needs to be supported by a more integrated approach by all levels of government.
... It involves exploring probable futures and how these futures can be rendered actionable through planned, methodical and strategic approaches vis-à-vis responding to multiple stresses at a defined scale. Whilst there is an expanding body of work around anticipatory logics with respect to climate adaptation in recent years (Anderson, 2010;Tschakert and Dietrich, 2010;Boyle and Dowlatabadi, 2011;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013;Kuruppu and Willie, 2014), much of this work remains theoretical and has not been adequately supported by empirical research, particularly in the case of Africa. There has been an apparent lack of explicitly practical engagement with questions on how the future particularly relates to the past and the present in different contexts. ...
... Enhanced flexibility in adaptation planning. Adaptation planning in complex vulnerability contexts such as Mbire is, many a time, a difficult and multifaceted process that is often affected by two main interconnected challenges, namely, the uncertainties related to future change and the limited flexibility in planning systems to cater for those uncertainties (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). The Mbire (livelihoods) environment is characterised by high uncertainty resulting not only from meteorological phenomena but also from market fluctuations, unstable macro-economic conditions and health challenges. ...
Purpose
– This study aims to explore the utility of anticipatory adaptation to climate variability and related livelihood sensitivities in rural African contexts using the case of Mbire district situated in the mid-Zambezi valley region of Zimbabwe. The provision of decadal climate information (up to ten years), as part of an anticipatory adaptation package, is at the centre of analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
– The study used semi-structured and key informant interviews, with a total of 45 semi-structured interviews being conducted with randomly selected long-term communal farmers in the case study area. Whilst data from semi-structured interviews was arranged in Microsoft Excel, thematic analysis was used in analyzing all data.
Findings
– Anticipatory adaptation and decadal climate projections are shown to potentially enhance flexibility in adaptation planning vis- à-vis responding to climate variability and other challenges, as well as reduce chances of maladaptation in responding to climate challenges in the context of multiple and reinforcing stresses and shocks.
Originality/value
– Anticipatory adaptation, with its three main pillars of future analysis, flexibility of strategies and proactive action, is emerging as key in assisting adaptation planning, the harnessing of opportunities and decision-making vis- à-vis responding to climate uncertainties and related livelihood sensitivities. Yet there have not been much empirically grounded analyses in understanding the role of anticipatory adaptation in rural Africa. This study therefore adds to evidence-based analyses towards understanding the role and utility of anticipatory adaptation in local communities in Africa.
... This is in line with Biermann et al. [111] and Ostrom and Janssen [112], who argue that although multilevel governance theory enables learning and succeeding at multiple scales, there is no guarantee that it can successfully deal with complex humanecological systems. Furthermore, it is congruent with numerous scholars who are of the view that to cope with the "wicked" problem of climate change, innovative and theoretically controversial adaptation actions whose goal is to support the associated social-ecological adaptation are necessary [113][114][115]. ...
Climate change is already a reality, and it is affecting the lives and livelihoods of many people globally. Many scientists argue that adaptation is, therefore, necessary to address the impact of climate change on life-supporting systems. Climate change adaptation, however, is a complex process that involves transformations implemented through governance at multiple levels. In this paper, the barriers to climate change adaptation in South Africa are presented and analysed. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted telephonically and online via Microsoft Teams with 13 government officials working at the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment; the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development and Environmental Affairs; and the uMkhanyakude District Municipality. The findings suggest that the barriers to climate change adaptation in South Africa include inadequate financial resources, a lack of human capacity at the provincial and local levels, limited political will at the local level, limited understanding of climate change adaptation issues by communities, inadequate coordination across government levels and sectors, no legal mandate at the local level, no climate change unit at the district and local levels, a lack of knowledge by some staff members tasked with environmental duties at the local level, not enough climate change plans in place at the local level, and outdated information on climate change used in the IDPs. This paper, therefore, recommends that climate change be a standing item in the Integrated Development Plan for local governments, which will ensure that climate change is budgeted for appropriately. In addition, this paper suggests that a mandate for climate change adaptation be developed for all three government levels. There is also a need for the government to invest in capacity development and improve horizontal and vertical coordination to strengthen the weak climate governance capacity that exists.
... Under current climate change projections, this situation is likely to spread in future to what are currently less fire-prone regions. Anticipatory governance is gaining increasing relevance in a context of local climate adaptation (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). Applied to governing wildfire risk, an anticipatory approach would allow uncoupling of management decisions from expectations according to past observations, allowing for more flexibility in adapting to future trajectories of change. ...
Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in decision-making and decision taking; (2) actor collaboration and coproduction across and within levels, scales, and networks; (3) path dependencies and local place-based dynamics of wildfire incidence and comprehension; and (4) actor adaptation to and anticipation of wildfire risk to fashion effective institutions that address the global wildfire challenge. We show how this framework can help specify a suite of bespoke analytical and policy practitioner approaches to facilitate preemptive and restorative wildfire strategies via new networks between communities, states, and wider society, thus providing the basis for more equitable and sustainable governance of wildfire risks and impacts.
... Reflexive governance places attention on the ways in which institutional frameworks and mechanisms can be transformed to address large-scale environmental degradation (Feindt and Weiland 2018), while adaptive co-management is focused on the governance of complex socio-ecological systems on a more regional and local scale with community resource management (Allen and Garmestani 2015). Anticipatory governance aims to use anticipation to guide decision-making, given the uncertainties related to sustainability and environmental challenges (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013). ...
... A case study approach is used in this research to gather and analyse relevant data and information. Contextual analyses look at natural wonders in their normal setting and use the information acquired by various methods and different sources ( Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013 ). Case-based learning is used widely across many disciplines, including research pertaining to information systems operation, e.g. ...
Coastal climate impact can affect coastal areas in a variety of ways, such as flooding, storm surges, reduction in beach sands and increased beach erosion. While each of these can have major impacts on the operation of coastal drainage systems, this thesis focuses on coastal and riverine
... Olhando para alguns instrumentos de planejamento territorial utilizados para as áreas protegidas, tais como planos diretores, planos municipais da mata atlântica, planos de manejo de unidades de conservação, torna-se interessante pensar que estes poderiam ser voltados para se planejar em cenários de complexidades e incertezas, como por exemplo, os das mudanças climáticas. Serrão-Neumann et al. (2013) afirmam que é importante ter um planejamento alternativo e que existe a necessidade de algumas abordagens nos sistemas de planejamento que possam lidar com 8 as incertezas. Pautam a adoção de abordagens emergentes de planejamento, apoiadas na governança antecipatória, como uma alternativa para os sistemas de planejamento, capazes de lidar com esses desafios e enfrentar a adaptação às mudanças climáticas. ...
Compreender como as áreas protegidas dialogam com instrumentos de governança, como se inserem no planejamento territorial nas várias escalas e nas políticas setoriais e qual seu potencial para enfrentamento das mudanças climáticas no SPAT-Sistema Produtor do Alto Tietê. Referencial teórico: a governança das áreas protegidas são interações entre estruturas, processos e tradições que determinam como o poder e as responsabilidades são exercidos. São relações entre múltiplos atores, instituições e temas, que expressam arranjos entre interesses e possibilidades de negociação, para prevalência do bem comum, relacionada com a implementação socialmente aceitável de políticas públicas. Método: a partir de dados de pesquisa sobre o SPAT, do conhecimento adquirido com práticas de planejamento, registros pessoais e pesquisa documental. É um estudo de caso sobre aplicação dos instrumentos de planejamento e governança, as áreas protegidas, que analisa impactos e transformações na produção do espaço e a condição de implementação da legislação das áreas protegidas no SPAT. Resultados e conclusão: as áreas protegidas são estratégicas para mitigação das mudanças climáticas. Sua governança é tema chave, aplicada tanto na gestão das unidades de conservação quanto dos mananciais hídricos. As mudanças climáticas já são realidade no SPAT, sendo importante, portanto, pensar estratégias de mitigação e adaptação diante de tais cenários. Implicações da pesquisa: analisando o SPAT, afirma-se que as áreas protegidas são instrumentos articuladores e integradores para proteção ambiental e desenvolvimento susten tável. Originalidade/valor: aliando a pesquisa à prática de planejamento e gestão, o estudo propõe contribuir com o debate sobre a governança dos recursos hídricos e a proteção ambiental, analisando as áreas protegidas do SPAT em cenários de mudanças climáticas.
... A case study approach is used in this research to gather and analyse relevant data and information. Contextual analyses look at natural wonders in their normal setting and use the information acquired by various methods and different sources (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). ...
Coastal climate impact can affect coastal areas in a variety of ways, such as flooding, storm surges, reduction in beach sands and increased beach erosion. While each of these can have major impacts on the operation of coastal drainage systems, this thesis focuses on coastal and riverine flooding in coastal areas.
Coastal flood risk varies within Australia, with the northern parts in the cyclone belt most affected and high levels of risk similar to other Asian countries. However, in Australia, the responsibility for managing coastal areas is shared between the Commonwealth government, Australian states and territories, and local governments. Strategies for floodplain management to reduce and control flooding are best implemented at the land use planning stage. Local governments make local decisions about coastal flood risk management through the assessment and approval of planning permit applications. Statutory planning by local government is informed by policies related to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, advice from government departments, agencies, experts and local community experts.
The West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority (WGCMA) works with local communities, Victorian State Emergency Services (VCSES), local government authorities (LGAs), and other local organizations to prepare the West Gippsland Flood Management Strategy (WGFMS). The strategy aims at identifying significant flood risks, mitigating those risks, and establishing a set of priorities for implementation of the strategy over a ten-year period.
The Bass Coast Shire Council (BCSC) region has experienced significant flooding over the last few decades, causing the closure of roads, landslides and erosion. Wonthaggi was particularly affected during this period with roads were flooded causing the northern part of the city of Wonthaggi to be closed in the worst cases. Climate change and increased exposure through the growth of urban population have dramatically increased the frequency and the severity of flood events on human populations.
Traditionally, while GIS has provided spatial data management, it has had limitations in modelling capability to solve complex hydrology problems such as flood events. Therefore, it has not been relied upon by decision-makers in the coastal management sector. Functionality improvements are therefore required to improve the processing or analytical capabilities of GIS in hydrology to provide more certainty for decision-makers.
This research shows how the spatial data (LiDAR, Road, building, aerial photo) can be primarily processed by GIS and how by adopting the spatial analysis routines associated with hydrology these problems can be overcome. The aim of this research is to refine GIS-embedded hydrological modelling so they can be used to help communities better understand their exposure to flood risk and give them more control about how to adapt and respond. The research develops a new Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to improve the implementation of coastal flooding risk assessment and management in Victoria, Australia. It is a solution integrating a range of approaches including, Light Detection and Ranging (Rata et al., 2014), GIS (Petroselli and sensing, 2012), hydrological models, numerical models, flood risk modelling, and multi-criteria techniques.
Bass Coast Shire Council is an interesting study region for coastal flooding as it involves (i) a high rainfall area, (ii) and a major river meeting coastal area affected by storm surges, with frequent flooding of urban areas. Also, very high-quality Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data is available from the Victorian Government to support first-pass screening of coastal risks from flooding. The methods include using advanced GIS hydrology modelling and LiDAR digital elevation data to determine surface runoff to evaluate the flood risk for BCSC. This methodology addresses the limitations in flood hazard modelling mentioned above and gives a logical basis to estimate tidal impacts on flooding, and the impact and changes in atmospheric conditions, including precipitation and sea levels. This study examines how GIS hydrological modelling and LiDAR digital elevation data can be used to map and visualise flood risk in coastal built-up areas in BCSC. While this kind of visualisation is often used for the assessment of flood impacts to infrastructure risk, it has not been utilized in the BCSC.
Previous research identified terrestrial areas at risk of flooding using a conceptual hydrological model (Pourali et al., 2014b) that models the flood-risk regions and provides flooding extent
maps for the BCSC. It examined the consequences of various components influencing flooding for use in creating a framework to manage flood risk. The BCSC has recognised the benefits of combining these techniques that allow them to analyse data, deal with the problems, create intuitive visualization methods, and make decisions about addressing flood risk.
The SDSS involves a GIS-embedded hydrological model that interlinks data integration and processing systems that interact through a linear cascade. Each stage of the cascade produces results which are input into the next model in a modelling chain hierarchy. The output involves GIS-based hydrological modelling to improve the implementation of coastal flood risk management plans developed by local governments.
The SDSS also derives a set of Coastal Climate Change (CCC) flood risk assessment parameters (performance indicators), such as land use, settlement, infrastructure and other relevant indicators for coastal and bayside ecosystems. By adopting the SDSS, coastal managers will be able to systematically compare alternative coastal flood-risk management plans and make decisions about the most appropriate option. By integrating relevant models within a structured framework, the system will promote transparency of policy development and flood risk management.
This thesis focuses on extending the spatial data handling capability of GIS to integrate climatic and other spatial data to help local governments with coastal exposure develop programs to adapt to climate change. The SDSS will assist planners to prepare for changing climate conditions. BCSC is a municipal government body with a coastal boundary and has assisted in the development and testing of the SDSS and derived many benefits from using the SDSS developed as a result of this research. Local governments at risk of coastal flooding that use the SDSS can use the Google Earth data sharing tool to determine appropriate land use controls to manage long-term flood risk to human settlement. The present research describes an attempt to develop a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to aid decision-makers to identify the proper location of new settlements where additional land development could be located based on decision rules. Also presented is an online decision-support tool that all stakeholders can use to share the results.
... Future studies should incorporate systems thinking to deal with complexity and uncertainty and should also integrate insights from relevant disciplinesincluding legal studies, environmental governance, ecology, environmental economics, climatology, physical geography, and urban and regional planning. To understand the process-and futureoriented images of delta transformation and resilience, we also argue that concepts from the fields of anticipatory governance [85][86][87][88], transformative governance [89][90][91][92], and interactive and integrative modes of governance [29,40,[69][70][71]93,94] would be useful. ...
Deltas worldwide have been experiencing pressures and challenges exacerbated by climate change. An explicit focus on deltas is lacking in various bodies of literature, although present in those bodies focusing on the resilience of social-ecological systems. However, overall, literature relevant for addressing water and climate governance in deltas is arguably still fragmented, leading to knowledge gaps and unexplored opportunities with regards to the development of delta-oriented governance strategies. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic literature review focusing on six bodies of literature relevant to delta governance up to and including the year 2019. The results show that scholarly interest in developing transformative pathways has increased sharply over the last few years. We derived seven key governance problems and five governance solutions for resilient deltas. We found that the predominant focus is still on technocratic approaches, with limited recognition of the political dimension and few forward-looking studies. In conclusion, we suggest stimulating the development and application of more anticipatory, transformative, and interactive modes of governance to help steer the transformation to resilient and sustainable deltas. We end with suggestions for systematic, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking empirical-analytical research.
... 478, 485;Hirokawa and Rosenbloom, 2013, p. 326;Foss 2018, p. 333;Kettle and Dow, 2014;Camacho, 2011Camacho, , p. 1839Snover et al., 2007, p. 28;Verschuuren 2013, p. 10). Researchers have called for scenario planning to account for this uncertainty (Berke and Lyles, 2013;Boyd et al., 2015;Quay, 2010;Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013;Trainor et al., 2009), but this kind of planning is relatively limited outside of large municipalities (Bartholomew, 2007;Chakraborty and McMillan, 2015). ...
... Measures therefore, need to be taken to regulate the location and pattern of human settlements in order to reduce flood vulnerabilities. Measures for managing disaster risks call for proactive approach from government and all agencies to effectively deal with the vulnerabilities of people living in settlements (Heazle et al., 2013;Serrao-Neumann, Harman & Low-Choy, 2013). Increase in populations along river banks, flood plains and sea coasts are therefore another major contributor to the increased occurrence of flood disasters. ...
The impact of flood disasters on development has resulted in unprecedented human, material,
economic and environmental losses, with some flooding events demonstrating the complexity
of disaster response. This study entailed researching the flood-impacted communities in
Tsholotsho District, South-west Zimbabwe. Recent flooding events in the district have
severely impacted the communities and their livelihoods. The success of this study can be
measured against the fulfilment of its research objectives. The study‘s overarching aim was to
develop a new model of disaster risk management for flood hazards and disasters. This
qualitative, phenomenological and interpretive study used Interview Guide and Observation
Checklist to gather data. The study found that flood disasters in Tsholotsho District caused
human population movements, destroyed crops, damaged shelter and infrastructure, caused
land and environmental degradation, destroyed small livestock, led to human injuries,
affected food storages and non-food items (NFIs), and disrupted education of the children.
Flood disasters were a result of settlements located close to the rivers and dams, settlements
located on the low lying areas, and the use of inferior materials to build human shelter and
infrastructure. Furthermore, communities lacked training and awareness to flood hazards,
whilst some farmers undertook bad farming practices along the rivers. Women and children,
members from poor households, people living with HIV/AIDS and the elderly were the most
impacted. Community livelihoods including crops, small livestock and dams were also
destroyed. People lived in flood prone areas due to culture and traditional beliefs, the
presence of fertile soils, good pastures, costs associated with relocation, and availability of
natural food resources. Previous interventions for flood management included relocation,
provision of food and NFIs, Early Warning and public education, and Indigenous Knowledge
Systems. All these have not been effective. The study concluded that flood disasters have
worsened poverty levels and threatened food security. The main conclusion of the study was
that the flood disasters in the district are human-induced. This study is significant as it offers
the Action-Time based Disaster Model, which is a new approach towards disasters.
Development planners, disaster managers, governments, land resettlement officers and the
academia are expected to benefit from the model.
... A large body of research confirms that action on climate change is significantly impeded by uncertainty concerning climate science [98][99][100]. Research in the Australian context shows that proactive governance intervention targeting climate change impacts is equally hampered by lack of political support [101][102][103]. The Moreton Bay case confirms the absence of strong political will to implement region-wide measures despite substantial scientific evidence of the state of the Bay's water quality [85]. ...
Combined pressures from climate change, resources demand and environmental degradation could lead to the collapse of marine systems and increase the vulnerability of populations dependent on them. In this paper an adaptability envelope framework is applied to investigate how governance arrangements may be addressing changing conditions of marine social-ecological systems, particularly where thresholds might have been crossed. The analysis focuses on three Australian case studies that have been significantly impacted by variations or changes in weather and climate over the past decade. Findings indicate that, in some cases, global scale drivers are triggering tipping points, which challenge the potential success of existing governance arrangements at the local scale. Governance interventions to address tipping points have been predominantly reactive, despite existing scientific evidence indicating that thresholds are approaching and/or being crossed. It is argued that marine governance arrangements need to be framed so that they also anticipate increasing marine social-ecological system vulnerability, and therefore build appropriate adaptive capacity to buffer against potential tipping points.
... Fisher, Mahajan and Mitcham call for the "reflexive participation by scientists and engineers in the internal governance of technology development" [24]. Anticipatory governance a term coined in 2002 [25] is a foresight framework and is used as a structure for government policy developers [26] and employed in public administration and management' [26,27], environmental studies [28], biological studies [29,30] and as a framework for the 'responsible development of nanotechnology' [25,31]. Emerging in 2002 from the science, technology, and society and social studies of nanotechnology field, anticipatory governance was developed as a call for the integration of social scientists in the early stages of technology development to better address potential concerns of varied stakeholders [32,25]. ...
Social Robotics is an emerging field, with many applications envisioned. Scientific and technological advancements constantly impact humans on the individual and societal level. Therefore one question increasingly debated is how to anticipate the impact of a given envisioned, emerging or new scientific or technological development and how to govern the emergence of scientific and technological advancements. Anticipatory governance has as a goal to discuss potential issues arising at the ground level of the emergence of a given scientific and technological product. Our study investigated a) the visibility of the anticipatory governance concept within the social robotic discourse and b) the implication of anticipatory governance for the social robotics field through the lens of a social robot design process and key documents from the UNESCO/ICSU 1999 World Conference on Sciences the lens. Our findings suggest that a) anticipatory governance is not a concept established within the social robotics fields so far; b) that social robotics as specific field is not engaged with within the anticipatory governance field and c) that many professional and academic fields are not yet involved in the social robotics discourse as aren’t many non-academic stakeholders. We posit that anticipatory governance can strengthen the social robotics field.
... Another group of challenges related to the complicated spectrum of roles and responsibilities involved in addressing onthe-ground climate change adaptation. While this challenge is well articulated in the literature in terms of governance issues involving vertical and horizontal integration between institutions that often lead to a poor response to climate change impacts (Agrawal, 2008; Biermann, 2007; Serrao-Neumann, Harman, & Low Choy, 2013), in our case it became evident the amount of existing overlaps of roles and responsibilities for addressing climate change adaptation between sectors. For example, stakeholders working in the human health sector often expressed frustration that environmental and social issues influencing people's health are positioned outside the mandate of their sector. ...
... For example, the disclosure of risks may have a direct impact upon property rights and values, as identified by the case studies; hence, it is critical to involve affected parties to discuss proposed solutions (Mercer and Jotkowitz 2000). Finally, the availability of scientific/technical information related to climate change science does not ensure that planning decisions will be made based on the evidence they provided (Serrao-Neumann, Harman, and Low Choy 2013). In fact, in the Australian context, land use planning decisions have been politically focused and often driven by private sector and economic interests (Measham et al. 2011;Taylor, Harman, and Inman 2013). ...
Public participation in decision making is a central component of the planning process; however, implementing effective engagement initiatives to resolve complex planning and policy problems, such as climate change, is challenging for planners. These challenges are particularly acute in coastal communities throughout Australia, where many settlements are at risk of future climate perturbations. Using the International Association for Public Participation framework for public participation, we analyse three local government led public participation initiatives in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, Australia. Our analysis suggests there are three critical factors that can influence the level of public participation in the context of climate change adaptation: the technocratic approach to decision making; absent high order government support; and the lack of evaluation mechanisms for public participation.
As climate change escalates and coastal populations increase, adaptation to ongoing risks to coastal communities due to rising sea levels and storm surges must be reassessed. In Australia, over $25 billion of coastal property is at substantial risk from inundation and erosion. The response by governments to coastal hazards has been to construct artificial sea barriers in a hold-the-line approach of investing in sea walls and beach nourishments1 to protect beachfront residential properties. However, are such structures reducing the long-term risk in an era of climate uncertainty? Is sand renourishment of beaches a sustainable solution to increasing erosion on the coast? Can planned relocations be implemented in planning policies? Sea walls perpetuate ongoing threats to coastal development and a shift in the methodology of land-use planning and adaptation for coastal communities must occur. This would be in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (UNDRR 2015) goal of strengthening disaster risk governance. A greater emphasis must be placed on strategic planning that directs people away from high-risk beachfronts. This research uses qualitative case studies to understand how local governments in New South Wales address the increasing risks to coastal residential development and the connection between government and risk hierarchies. A framework is proposed to integrate national risk hierarchies into state and local government planning to assist in managing strategic relocations and implementing nature-based solutions.
While digitalization such as central bank digital currency (CBDC) would carry environmental implications, it also has the potential to contribute to sustainable development. CBDC and sustainable development are both crucial but underexplored issues that pose significant challenges for governments and industry alike. How should decisionmakers address the unpredictability arising from new technology and CBDC ecosystems? How should we manage sustainability and digitalisation?
Climate change is dominating social, political and economic agendas. Because of the salience of the issue, scientists, researchers and consultants have developed a plethora of climate adaptation strategies. In this article I analyse two such strategies: Adapting South African Cities and Towns: A Local Government Guide to Climate Change Adaptation Planning by Ziervogel and Methner; and Climate Change Vulnerability in South East Queensland: A Spatial and Sectoral Assessment by Choy et al. For this analysis I utilised the PULSE 3 analytical framework. My analysis indicated that the two adaptation strategies were predominantly positivist in scientific orientation. Other paradigms and theories are also applicable in explaining the issue of climate change and how to adapt to it.
Climate change is dominating social, political and economic agendas. Because of the salience of the issue, scientists, researchers and consultants have developed a plethora of climate adaptation strategies. In this article I analyse two such strategies: Adapting South African Cities and Towns: A Local Government Guide to Climate Change Adaptation Planning by Ziervogel and Methner; and Climate Change Vulnerability in South East Queensland: A Spatial and Sectoral Assessment by Choy et al. For this analysis I utilised the PULSE3 analytical framework. My analysis indicated that the two adaptation strategies were predominantly positivist in scientific orientation. Other paradigms and theories are also applicable in explaining the issue of climate change and how to adapt to it.
Northern communities are experiencing greater climate variability, with extreme climate impacts occurring more frequently and with more intensity; with the need for adaptation to reduce the risk becoming more immediate. Specific stressors and decision dynamics surrounding the nature of local government policy and planning for climate adaptation are underrepresented in the scholarship. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature by exploring the case of Homer, Alaska. Through narratives of key informants connected to the community’s climate change agenda, this research explores primary climate stressors and the nature of adaptation policy integration. Findings suggests that while Homer is experiencing a variety of climate change impacts, adaptation remains a low priority for city officials. This study sheds light on some of the challenges of integrating climate adaptation policy with strategic community planning, and in turn provides decision-makers with insight into considerations for mainstreaming resilience thinking at a local government scale.
Australian local governments are expected to be the frontline of climate change adaptation implementation, but existing institutional arrangements are inadequate. Institutional changes that make adaptation pathways part of land use planning policy are needed and how this might happen is assessed using New South Wales (NSW), Australia, as a case study. The most effective implementation mechanism is identified as an independent adaptation statute integrated with land use planning. The institutional assessment approach employed is potentially useful for identifying adaptation policy implications in planning systems and is of relevance to ogoing research into local level adaptation.
摘要
预计澳大利亚地方政府将是实施气候变化适应行动的前线，但现有的制度安排不足. 需要进行制度变革，使适应途径成为土地利用规划政策的一部分，并以澳大利亚新南威尔士州（新南威尔士州）为案例研究，对如何实现这一目标进行了评估. 最有效的执行机制是与土地利用规划相结合的独立适应法规. 所采用的机构评估方法可能有助于确定规划系统中的适应政策影响，并与地方一级适应研究的开展有关.
The 1994 democratic rule and Constitution of 1996 shaped the way in which service delivery would be transformed in South Africa. This was done by developing new structures and policies that would ultimately attempt to create equity and fairness in the provision of services within the municipal sphere to all residents. This article analyses the perceptions of business owners regarding the creation of an enabling environment and service delivery within one of the best performing municipalities in Gauteng: the Midvaal Local Municipal area. A total of 50 business owners were interviewed by means of a quantitative questionnaire. Data were statistically analyzed by using descriptive data as well as a chi-square cross-tabulation. The results revealed that the general perception of
service delivery is above acceptable levels. However, in some categories, the business owners were less satisfied regarding land use and zoning process and regulations. Overall, the business owners felt that the local government was creating an enabling environment for business to prosper. No significant statistical difference was found regarding perceptions of service delivery and the enabling environment, between small and large businesses in the study area. This type of analysis provides the foundation for improved service delivery and policy development and allows for future comparative analysis research into local government. The research has also placed the relationship between good governance, service delivery and the creation of an enabling environment in the spotlight.
Literature review shows that crucial steps of successful mainstreaming process mainly include: awareness-raising, the establishment of an enabling environment, development of tools, training and technical support, change in operational practice, measuring progress and lastly, learning and experience sharing. Theoretically, these steps are sequential and successive, but in practice, they might overlap and interact with each other or even reverse in order. Among these steps, reforming the enabling environment to develop related policies, legislation, institutional arrangements is crucial for adaptation mainstreaming.
Geologists are considering in earnest whether to mark the emergence of a new geological epoch – characterized by human impacts on the geology of the planet – as the dawn of the Anthropocene. In this third of three urban geography progress reports, I identify interrelated elements of what I call ‘Anthropocene thinking’ – non-linearity, reworked temporalities, and ontologies of systemicity – that invite the perceived need for ‘anticipatory governance’ and pervade contemporary urban theory and governance. This is exemplified, I argue, by two current trends in urban governance: the promotion of smart and resilient cities.
This paper is a case study of a team of Dutch water managers who saw that to achieve flexibility in planning they needed to engage with organisational control requirements. Rather than approaching flexibility normatively, as much planning literature does, this paper presents a case of flexibility empirically – as something actors negotiate through their strategising within planning practice, within their organisational context. The analysis shows the importance of approaching flexibility in planning as an intra-organisational issue, presents insights on the strategies actors employ in negotiating flexibility and control intra-organisationally, and points to the political nature of dynamics between flexibility and control.
Managing urban growth is inherently contentious. Government policies seek to facilitate and spatially contain growth, while balancing public and private interests. The need for climate adaptation strategies in the urban context is recognised but arguably poorly institutionalised in growth management policies or in urban governance more broadly. This paper considers how debates around urban adaptation and growth management are structured in the discourses of local government, private developers and other actors. A discourse analysis of written submissions and media releases from four urban policy debates in Queensland, Australia, is presented. The analysis highlights the discursive strategies employed by different actors and the way their arguments have been consolidated in the practices of urban policy-making. The analysis suggests a divergence of growth and adaptation storylines, contributing to maintaining the gap between these policy agendas. Progress may be made, however, in the pragmatic discourses of actual policy implementation.
There is growing evidence that the problems, challenges and opportunities that our cities, city-regions and regions are facing cannot be tackled adequately by traditional spatial planning. One of the key challenges for planning in this respect is to analyse critically what type of planning is suited as an approach to deal – in an innovative/emancipatory and transformative way – with the problems and challenges developing and developed societies are facing. An expanding literature and an increasing number of practices all over the world seem to suggest that strategic spatial planning may be looked upon as a possible approach. But at the same time critical comments and reactions are raised on the theory and the practices of strategic spatial planning. This paper uses the theory and practices of coproduction to reframe strategic spatial planning. It first looks for a deeper understanding of the meaning(s) of coproduction as it emerged in different contexts and different intellectual traditions and then introduces coproduction as an immanent characteristic of a more radical type of strategic planning. Coproduction combines the provision of public goods/services needed with the building of a strong, resilient and mutually supportive community that could assure its members their needs would be met. This implies changing the perceptions and the approach of many professionals (public and private) about how plans, policies and public services are conceived and delivered, with the objective of enabling the (structural) change needed in an open and equitable way. The paper relies on a selective review of critical planning literature and the author’s experience in practice.
There has been a recent growth in interest within planning theory in Actor–Network Theory. This article explores the potential for Actor–Network Theory to deliver a distinctive perspective on planning practice. Using a case study of commercial office development and the discussion of its carbon performance within the regulatory planning process, an Actor–Network Theory–based analysis is provided. The analysis points to the role of planning policy documents as intermediaries, the planning consent process as an obligatory passage point and energy-modelling exercises as potentially black-boxing low-carbon development. It also emphasises how materiality of the development embodies compliance with policy through the construction and warranting of evidence claims. In all these ways, the relationships between actants within networks are shaped. The practice-based conclusions draw attention to the importance of planners devising highly detailed and carefully worded plan policies, and understanding and being able to challenge the knowledge derived from energy-modelling tools as ways of developing agency to influence the outcomes of planning practice. Such agency is revealed by an Actor–Network Theory analysis to be small work in local sites of practice but set against the backdrop of regulatory regimes.
With cities facing climate change, climate adaptation is necessary to reduce risks such as heat stress and flooding and maintain the goals of sustainable urban development. In climate change literature, the focus has been on developing a new dedicated policy domain for climate adaptation. Yet, empirical evidence shows that in practice actors are searching for solutions that not only serve climate adaptation, but integrate the adaptation objective in existing policy domains (e.g., urban planning, water management, public health). The integration of adaptation in other policy domains, also called “mainstreaming climate adaptation,” can stimulate the effectiveness of policy making through combining objectives, increase efficient use of human and financial resources and ensure long-term sustainable investments. A better understanding of the process of mainstreaming is, however, lacking. The article introduces a conceptual model for mainstreaming climate adaptation to enhance our understanding of the concept as well as the barriers and opportunities that influence these integration processes and to explore strategies for overcoming barriers and creating opportunities. Two Dutch case studies—related to urban planning—are used to illustrate the value of the model. The cases demonstrate the dynamic process of mainstreaming and raise discussion of the appropriate criteria for evaluating mainstreaming in relation to the aims of climate adaptation. The paper concludes with an exploration of specific strategies to facilitate the mainstreaming of adaptation in existing and new policy domains.
Within the planning literature, the distinction between regulatory planning and strategic spatial planning has exposed a recurring dichotomy that exists between the idea of ‘conforming’ (regulative certainty) and ‘performing’ (strategic flexibility) plans and planning systems. This paper critically examines the divergent trajectories of land-use policy and regulation in two Australian states, Queensland and New South Wales. This paper concludes by arguing that the flexibility/certainty dilemma is something of an artifice—a land-use planning shibboleth—that serves to distract professional and scholarly attention away from substantive issues such as how planning might better engender more sustainable urban settlements.
Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.
Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly. In this paper, we undertake the first global review of the population and urban settlement patterns in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), defined here as the contiguous area along the coast that is less than 10 metres above sea level. Overall, this zone covers 2 per cent of the world's land area but contains 10 per cent of the world's population and 13 per cent of the world's urban population. A disproportionate number of the countries with a large share of their population in this zone are small island countries, but most of the countries with large populations in the zone are large countries with heavily populated delta regions. On average, the Least Developed Countries have a higher share of their population living in the zone (14 per cent) than do OECD countries (10 per cent), with even greater disparities in the urban shares (21 per cent compared to 11 per cent). Almost two-thirds of urban settlements with populations greater than 5 million fall, at least partly, in the zone. In some countries (most notably China), urbanization is driving a movement in population towards the coast. Reducing the risk of disasters related to climate change in coastal settlements will require a combination of mitigation, migration and settlement modification.
I explore the core Habermasian concept of rational consensus-formation and its counterfactuality before introducing the possibility of permanence of conflict, non-reciprocity and domination (i.e. of agonism) which may productively explain some of the powergames enacted in planning decision-making. In so doing I draw on the concept of agonism and introduce the political into Habermas' moral theorization. Where the personal and the political intersect there is a role for psychology. I illustrate how Habermas' communicative theorizing was itself partly developed from a psychoanalytical tradition before introducing some of the concepts popularized by Jacques Lacan. I conclude that development of communicative planning theory could usefully retain some of Habermas' psychological foundations while turning to the work of Lacan as a basis for an enhanced understanding of the realities of planning practice.
Historically, climate change has been viewed as an environmental pollution issue with international agreements narrowly focused on mitigation, while neglecting other responses including adaptation. This article discusses barriers and opportunities for the upscaling of adaptation into the international policy arena. It argues for the development of global adaptation models accounting for actual adaptation actions; for the refinement of processes that lead to adaptation; and for the accumulation of evidence from a growing number of adaptation case studies. A new challenge for adaptation science will be to integrate adaptation into the next phases of mitigation and development policy. Historiquement, le changement climatique a été considéré en terme de problème de pollution environnementale dont les accords internationaux sont étroitement centrés sur la mitigation, au défaut d'autres réponses telles que l'adaptation. Cet article débat des obstacles et possibilités de promotion de l'adaptation à l'intérieur de la sphère des politiques internationales. L'article est en faveur de l'expansion de modèles globaux d'adaptation incorporant les actions réelles, d'un raffinement des processus donnant lieu à l'adaptation, et à l'accumulation d'indices sur l'adaptation issus d'un nombre croissant d'études de cas sur l'adaptation. Un nouveau défi pour la science de l'adaptation sera d'intégrer l'adaptation dans les prochaines étapes des politiques de mitigation et de développement.
Problem: Human and natural systems will probably have to adapt to climate change impacts, but this cannot be planned for using the traditional approach based on predictions because of the subject's great complexity, its planning horizon more than 50 years away, and uncertainty about the future climate and how effectively CO2 emissions will be reduced.Purpose: This article proposes a more appropriate basis for planning climate change adaptation. Anticipatory governance is a flexible decision framework that uses a wide range of possible futures to prepare for change and to guide current decisions toward maximizing future alternatives or minimizing future threats. Rather than trying to tame or ignore uncertainty, this approach explores uncertainty and its implications for current and future decision making.Methods: I review and summarize the literature on anticipatory governance and provide three case studies to demonstrate its application to climate change planning.Results and conclusions: Denver Water, New York City, and the City of Phoenix are all using scenarios to anticipate the range of global climate changes that may impact their communities and to develop adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Each is developing a decision framework for implementing adaptation strategies incrementally based on climate monitoring. An incremental approach minimizes the resources that must be allocated to address these risks and has allowed these cities to plan in spite of the high uncertainty associated with climate change science and social change.Takeaway for practice: The complexity, uncertainty, and distant planning horizon associated with climate change cannot be managed sufficiently for the traditional predict-and-plan approach to yield good decisions about the significant social and capital investments likely to be required for adaptation. To be successful, social institutions must embrace new methods that explore uncertainty and that provide strategic guidance for current and future decisions.Research support: None.
Sea-level rise, storm surges and changing weather patterns along oceans and coasts are issues of increasing urgency for Australia as rising numbers of people seek the sea-change lifestyle. A survey of the Australian state of Victoria's 22 coastal municipalities was employed to assess the degree to which they recognise climate change as a threat to their coastal zones. Questions were also used to gain an understanding of the adaptive capacity of the municipalities to coastal vulnerabilities and to highlight current and future strategies for adapting to climate change along coasts. The findings show that climate change is not being addressed adequately via statutory planning in Victoria.
Municipal planning represents a key avenue for local adaptation, but is subject to recognised constraints. To date, these constraints have focused on simplistic factors such as limited resources and lack of information. In this paper we argue that this focus has obscured a wider set of constraints which need to be acknowledged and addressed if adaptation is likely to advance through municipal planning. Although these recognised constraints are relevant, we argue that what underpins these issues are more fundamental challenges affecting local, placed-based planning by drawing on the related field of community-based environmental planning (CBEP). In considering a wider set of constraints to practical attempts towards adaptation, the paper considers planning based on a case study of three municipalities in Sydney, Australia in 2008. The results demonstrate that climate adaptation was widely accepted as an important issue for planning conducted by local governments. However, it was yet to be embedded in planning practice which retained a strong mitigation bias in relation to climate change. In considering the case study, we draw attention to factors thus far under-acknowledged in the climate adaptation literature. These include leadership, institutional context and competing planning agendas. These factors can serve as constraints or enabling mechanisms for achieving climate adaptation depending upon how they are exploited in any given situation. The paper concludes that, through Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change addressing these issues, local, place-based planning can play a greater role in achieving climate adaptation.
Though legislatures and agencies are considering how to prevent further climate change, some adverse effects from a warming climate are already inevitable. Adapting to these effects is essential, but regulators and scholars have largely neglected this need. This Article evaluates the capacity of natural resource governance to cope with the effects of climate change, and provides a framework for Congress to help it do so.The Article identifies unprecedented uncertainty as the paramount impediment raised by climate change, and demonstrates how existing fragmented governance is poorly adapted to deal with this challenge. Drawing on lessons from prior regulatory experiments, it proposes a comprehensive strategy for managing uncertainty that promotes interagency information sharing. It also recommends that legislators adopt an "adaptive governance" framework that requires agencies to systematically monitor and adapt their decisions and programs. This learning infrastructure would promote agency learning and accountability, help manage uncertainty, and reduce the likelihood and magnitude of mistakes expected to come with facing such an exceptional problem with initially imprecise tools.The Article operates on four levels. First, it uses case studies to illustrate valuable lessons about the challenges of creating effective natural resource management. Second, the Article is anchored in the specific implications of climate change, considering the value of interagency information sharing and adaptive governance in addressing climate effects. Third, it engages the growing theoretical literature on adaptive management and federalism. Finally, it provides insight on how agencies can manage uncertainty that has far-reaching implications for other areas of administrative regulation.
Formal planning for climate change adaptation is emerging rapidly at a range of geo-political scales. This first generation
of adaptation plans provides useful information regarding how institutions are framing the issue of adaptation and the range
of processes that are recognized as being part of an adaptation response. To better understand adaptation planning among developed
nations, a set of 57 adaptation plans from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States was evaluated against a suite
of 19 planning processes identified from existing guidance instruments for adaptation planning. Total scores among evaluated
plans ranged from 16% of the maximum possible score to 61%, with an average of 37%. These results suggest adaptation plans
are largely under-developed. Critical weaknesses in adaptation planning are related to limited consideration for non-climatic
factors as well as neglect for issues of adaptive capacity including entitlements to various forms of capital needed for effective
adaptation. Such gaps in planning suggest there are opportunities for institutions to make better use of existing guidance
for adaptation planning and the need to consider the broader governance context in which adaptation will occur. In addition,
the adaptation options prescribed by adaptation plans reflect a preferential bias toward low-risk capacity-building (72% of
identified options) over the delivery of specific actions to reduce vulnerability. To the extent these findings are representative
of the state of developed nation adaptation planning, there appear to be significant deficiencies in climate change preparedness,
even among those nations often assumed to have the greatest adaptive capacity.
KeywordsClimate change–Adaptation–Adaptive capacity–Planning–Evaluation
Local governments and communities have a critical role to play in adapting to climate variability and change. Spatial vulnerability
assessment is one tool that can facilitate engagement between researchers and local stakeholders through the visualisation
of climate vulnerability and the integration of its biophysical and socio-economic determinants. This has been demonstrated
through a case study from Sydney, Australia where a bushfire vulnerability assessment was undertaken as the first-step in
a project to investigate local government perceptions of climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity. A series of relevant
biophysical and socio-economic indicators was identified that represented the region’s exposure, sensitivity and adaptive
capacity with respect to bushfires. These indicators were then combined to develop maps of net landscape vulnerability to
bushfire. When presented in a workshop setting, vulnerability maps were successful in capturing the attention of stakeholders
while simultaneously conveying information regarding the diversity of drivers that can contribute to current and future vulnerability.
However, stakeholders were reluctant to embrace representations of vulnerability that differed from their own understanding
of hazard, necessitating the demonstration of agreement between the vulnerability assessment and more conventional hazard
assessment tools. This validation opened the door for public dissemination of vulnerability maps, the uptake and use of the
assessment in local government risk assessment and adaptation planning, and more focused case-studies on barriers to adaptation.
This article examines the application of performance-based planning at the local level in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. A review of the literature finds that there have been few evaluations of performance-based planning, despite its being used by many governments. The authors provide a comparative review of the experiences of various jurisdictions in implementing this form of zoning and present observations on its relative strengths and weaknesses. Findings suggest that many of the jurisdictions that adopted performance-based planning subsequently abandoned it because of the heavy administrative burden required, and where performance methods survived, they were typically hybridized with traditional zoning. If performance-based approaches continue to be used, there is a need to better understand the administrative and implementation implications of this type of land use regulation.
Adaptive management, an established method in natural resource and ecosystem management, has not been widely applied to landscape planning due to the lack of an operational method that addresses the role of uncertainty and standardized monitoring protocols and methods. A review of adaptive management literature and practices reveals several key concepts and principles for adaptive planning: (1) management actions are best understood and practiced as experiments; (2) several plans/experiments can be implemented simultaneously; (3) monitoring of management actions are key; and (4) adaptive management can be understood as ‘learning by doing’. The paper identifies various uncertainties in landscape planning as the major obstacles for the adoption of an adaptive approach. To address the uncertainty in landscape planning, an adaptive planning method is proposed where monitoring plays an integral role to reduce uncertainty. The proposed method is then applied to a conceptual test in water resource planning addressing abiotic-biotic-cultural resources. To operationalize adaptive planning, it is argued that professionals, stakeholders and researchers need to function in a genuinely transdisciplinary mode where all contribute to, and benefit from, decision making and the continuous generation of new knowledge.
In sum, the climate for spatial planning is changing. Climate protection considerations are central to the new strategy for sustainable development and the planning framework that is charged with delivering this agenda. The gradual accumulation of planning guidance across a range of arenas, including housing, regional planning, transport, flooding and renewables, to name just the most obvious examples, provides a significant basis upon which to build regional and local strategies. There is evidence that regional bodies and local authorities are beginning to integrate climate protection into these strategies, at the rhetorical level at least. However, in seeking to put climate protection into practice, spatial planning faces some key challenges that it alone cannot resolve but with which it must engage. First, the need to shift the time horizons of political decision making into the future, yet act quickly. Second, the imperative to create a more robust and specific language which can be used to promote climate protection in the face of competing demands on the planning system. Finally, the requirement to find a means of dealing with the controversies that arise from seeking to resolve a collective problem in specific places. The critical issue at stake here is one of recognizing that such concerns may reflect a broader critique of the inadequacy of the ways in which we are trying to address climate change and, indeed, of how we are defining the problem.
This article advances that the distinctive characteristics of Australian metropolitan planning that developed last century have become entrenched and enlarged in the mainland metropolitan strategies of the first decade of the 21st century. However, while such plans were reasonably successful and appropriate in the circumstances of the long boom, this modernist approach is no longer apposite for the more fluid, fluent and complex dynamics of current Australian metropolitan centres. The article discusses why this may be so and explores ways in which current metropolitan strategic planning processes might be reconfigured to more positively reflect and guide these more complex and uncertain challenges.
Climate change is a major issue for all levels of government, global, national and local. Local authorities' responses to climate change have tended to concentrate on their role in reducing greenhouse gases. However, the scientific consensus is that we also need to adapt to unavoidable climate change. Spatial planning at a local level has a critical anticipatory role to play in promoting robust adaptation. This paper reviews the shift in local authorities' planning policies for climate change adaptation in the UK since 2000, and provides evidence of underlying attitudes amongst planning professionals to climate change. It shows that, while the issue of climate change is becoming recognized with respect to flood risk, the wider implications (for instance, for biodiversity and water resources) are not yet integrated into plans. The reasons for this lie in lack of political support and lack of engagement of the planning profession with climate change networks. But the paper also argues there are difficulties in acknowledging the need for adaptation at the local level, with the short-term horizons of local plans at odds with perceptions of the long-term implications of climate change.
Climate change is changing the context of spatial planning and shaping its priorities. It has strengthened its environmental dimension and has become a new rationale for coordinating actions and integrating different policy priorities.
This book sets out the economic, social and environmental challenges that climate change raises for urban and regional planners and explores current and potential responses. These are set within the context of research and scholarly works on the role of spatial planning in combating climate change. Addressing both mitigation measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to the effects of climate change, the book provides an overview of emerging practice, with analysis of the drivers of policy change and practical implementation of measures. It scopes planning issues and opportunities at different spatial scales, drawing on international experiences and highlighting the need to link global and local responses to shared risks and opportunities.
In 1994 an unusual, if not unique, collaborative effort emerged to manage the highly contested and interconnected system of waters, levees, and habitat in the San Francisco Bay Estuary and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This CALFED Bay-Delta Program (CALFED) engaged 25 federal and state agencies and representatives of 35 major stakeholder groups and local agencies in a joint search for solutions to Bay-Delta problems. It changed how water was managed and produced new practices that persisted until at least 2005. CALFED's collaborative approach is by nature informal, and it coexists uneasily with the norms and structure of formal government. This story illustrates how formal and informal systems are interdependent, yet in tension, across planning, participation, and decision making. Because planners often operate in the interface between the formal and the informal, the story offers lessons that can be applied at many levels of government and for many planning tasks.
In the UK, the Labour government (1997–2010) introduced various experiments to uplift English regional and sub-regional spatial strategy to a more prominent position in sub-national governance but much of this has been subsequently guillotined by the incoming Coalition government in May 2010. This paper assesses the prospect for the survival of strategic spatial thinking under the Coalition government's ethos of ‘localism’. It first considers some of the broad conceptual issues relating to strategic spatial planning, identifying three key conundrums around flexibility of scaling, institutional structures and capacity, and core values and forms of knowledge. It then provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of what was achieved during the outgoing Labour administration, and what ultimately went wrong with the English regional planning project. Finally, an initial assessment is made of the future prospects for strategic planning in England to survive in new spatial contexts, despite the hostile conditions associated with the Coalition government.
In many cases in which climate change affects natural resources, impacts are uncertain and adaptation to climate change often involves collective action problems at the local level, which are embedded in multilevel governance regimes. Adaptive management (AM) is an emerging approach to deal with such uncertainty and complexity by promoting multilevel institutions that are robust to change and able to learn. Much of the literature evaluating AM in multilevel governance regimes, however, focuses only on the adherence to certain structural features said to make AM successful, leaving aside the question whether AM actually produces desired outcomes. This paper evaluates AM in multilevel regimes also in terms of the outcomes they produce. To this end, we first apply the Management and Transition Framework (MTF) in order to describe three multilevel regimes in Lesotho. For each regime we then observe whether it adheres to the structure features of AM. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which the outcomes, natural resource management projects, are conducive to Ostrom's (1990) ‘design principles’ for sustainable common-pool resource management. We find that, though no ideal ‘adaptive regime’ is found in Lesotho, the results confirm the AM hypotheses that decentralised decision-making, open information sources, and plurality of user interests lead to improved outcomes. Conversely, elements of the climate regime are found not to be adaptive. Our findings also confirm the appropriateness of AM as a governance approach to climate adaptation.
Shifting from traditional, large, centralised infrastructure to alternative, distributed technologies is widely accepted as essential for enabling sustainable water management. Despite technical advances in sustainable urban water management over recent decades, the shift from traditional to more sustainable approaches remains slow. Current research on socio-institutional barriers suggests this poor implementation relates to a limited understanding of the different forms of governance needed to support alternative approaches, rather than the potential ineffectiveness of the technologies and practices. While some governance scholars express preferences for ideal hierarchical, market or network governance approaches, others suggest a hybrid of these approaches may be more appropriate for achieving sustainability. Currently, there is limited commentary about the potential characteristics of sustainable urban water governance. To extend the current scholarship, this paper systematically draws on the tacit knowledge of expert sustainability practitioners to identify potential governance characteristics of sustainable urban water management. In comparison with current urban water scholarship, which is supportive of a network governance approach at a conceptual level, the results strongly suggest that sustainability practitioners see the need for hybrid governance arrangements at a practical and operational level. These hybrid arrangements tended to comprise network and hierarchical approaches with market governance instruments. These insights from practitioners to help identify future research needs, focused on examining interaction among governance approaches at a variety of scales and locations.
This article examines how citizens in authoritarian political contexts learn radical planning for social transformation. After identifying a series of gaps in the radical planning literature, the article uses a longitudinal study (1994-2001) of collective action in an urban settlement in Indonesia as a heuristic device to develop a more nuanced model of radical planning. The study illustrates how cumulative participation in state-directed planning, community-based planning, and covert planning over time resulted in a sense of collective agency that served as a foundation for demanding political reform at a moment when state control was weakened.
For thirty years planners and critics of planning alike have confronted inadequacies in the traditional model of comprehensive rational planning. Despite this intellectual acknowledgement of the need for a different paradigm, the underlying characteristics of rationality still pervade planning education and practice. This paper argues that the more insidious features derive from the broader institutional context and deeper historical roots of the field. Consequently, practitioners cannot incorporate alternative forms of knowledge in planning unless they both become conscious of how they have accepted classic rational assumptions and are willing to adopt a new concept of planning. The essay briefly reviews several promising approaches to planning that cope with the implications of the rational paradigm and/or substitute other models. However, academics cannot expect practicing planners to adopt alternative approaches unless they demonstrate them effectively. To do so, they need to develop new teaching approaches in planning schools and to alter their own behavior so as to encourage new roles rather than simply reinforcing existing ones.
Scientific knowledge is central to “good” governance of coastal spaces: developing methods through which the complexities of the coastal zone can be understood by stakeholders to improve the sustainable management of coastal systems. Enhancing our knowledge of the range of processes that shape coastal spaces and define the total behavioural environment of the system remains a primary challenge for the coastal research community. However, this article raises the argument that current approaches to Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM)—the preferred governing framework for the coastal environment, do not give sufficient emphasis to this fundamental need. Improving the basic scientific knowledge that underpins policymaking at the coast is argued to be urgently needed. Issues such as that of developing a communality of the purpose and approach between stakeholders within the coastal zone (through conflict resolution and access to information, for example) seem to claim the rights of the integrated management research agenda. However, the very nature of ICZM as “worthwhile coastal management” requires that integrated management represents more than a governing framework. Successful integration in coastal management must also be underpinned by knowledge of the integrated behavior of the system. Science has an increasingly marginalized position within ICZM and as a result geographers, contributing knowledge of the patterns and processes of the human and environmental landscapes, are also becoming a disappearing breed in integrated coastal management.
While sustainable cities have been promoted as a desirable goal within a variety of policy contexts, critical questions concerning the extent to which cities and local governments can address the challenges of sustainability remain unanswered. We use a multilevel governance perspective to examine the discursive and material struggles which take place in creating sustainable cities. In exploring the politics of implementing climate protection through development planning in Newcastle upon Tyne and transport planning in Cambridgeshire, we find that the interpretation and implementation of sustainability are shaped by forms of governance which stretch across geographical scales and beyond the boundary of the urban. We argue that the 'urban' governance of climate protection involves relations between levels of the state and new network spheres of authority which challenge traditional distinctions between local, national and global environmental politics.
This monogram suggests that while planning seeks ertainty and the avoidance of conflict in its practices, this is at best an unrealisable fantasy, an unfulfillable desire for security in modernity, and one that has considerable cost. The work examines current planning practice from the perspective of Foucault's governmentality, Flyvbjerg's and Bourdieu's conceptualisations of practical reason and Lacan's psychoanalytical theory. Planning is argued to be driven, at least in New Zealand, by a desire to seek institutional performativity and efficiency. The discipline attempts to achieve this by seeking compromise and the avoidance of conflict with dominant actors, while minimising, the resistance of the docile majority. Habermasian derived communicative planning theory is specifically examined in this context and found wanting.The essay prescribes one possible agonistic and passionate response for an alternative communicative planning practice, drawing on Arendt and Foucault. It then illustrates the similarity, and value of, Foucauldian genealogical theory and aspects of Lacan's psychoanalytical theory for fostering understanding within this proposed polemical response, particularly, as the application of these methods have the ability to expose pernicious elements of planning related practices, rhetoric and actions. The monogram will conclude with a discussion of ‘planning for the Others’ desire’ rather than the persistent fantasy of ‘planning for certainty’ in a finite and capricious world.
Coastal development is spreading along the World's coasts. Sea levels are rising, so major future asset losses are expected. Planned retreat from the sea behind natural ecological defences is one adaptation option. To maintain it, land could be set aside for colonisation by coastal ecosystems, or buildings constructed on condition they are removed when sea level reaches a specified distance from the building.
Similarities among coastal issues in high-income countries encouraged us to produce a generalisable analytical framework for exploring planned retreat. We applied it to South East Queensland, Australia, where the option of planned retreat is disappearing because (1) State Government promotes population increase; (2) the need to provide places for naturally protective coastal ecosystems to occupy does not seem urgent, so houses are built there; (3) liability laws favour development; (4) planning ignores cumulative impacts, the path dependent nature of development and irreversible social–ecological threshold changes; (5) political pressure to build defences grows as the value of built assets increases.
To implement planned retreat, changes to coastal governance would be needed, for which we propose five guiding principles: (a) allocate authority and resources between levels of governance according to their effectiveness at each level; (b) strengthen development rules and incentives to relocate as an unwanted threshold is approached; (c) allow for uncertainties by enabling rules and incentives to be changed when circumstances change; (d) reassign public and private benefits, costs, risks, uncertainties and responsibilities from governments to beneficiaries of development; (e) institutionalise catastrophes as opportunities for change, not signals to rebuild.
Purpose
When coping with complex, but also possibly disruptive and open‐ended social dynamics, the anticipatory system idea, which was developed by Rosen in the realm of physical and biological system observation, remains a reference framework, but one that may need to be reinforced by other theoretical considerations. This paper aims at using a debate that took place in a specific foresight discussion arena on early detection and weak signal analysis, as a constructive epistemic detour to eventually contribute to such a reinforcement of Rosen's anticipatory system proposal.
Design/methodology/approach
The author aims at revisiting Rosen's framework with stimulating inputs drawing upon the early detection debates, by first assessing the original concepts brought up by Ansoff in the 1970s and 1980s and its further enhancements by contemporary scholars. A rather constructivist approach is then developed to weak signal analysis, aiming at emphasising the need, in analytical situations involving social system features, for reflexive stages and capacities. Bearing this requirement in mind, the productive value of the “framing” and “meta‐framing” notions is explored, in order to apply them to Rosen's anticipatory systems and possibly contribute to enriching his original concept.
Findings
How effective the framing and meta‐framing couple can be for a series of anticipatory issues is described in a detailed manner and, then more specifically, Rosen's anticipatory system concept is revisited in the light of those inputs, aiming at putting into perspective new options for research and anticipation activities in general.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is essentially conceptual and based on a rich but disputable detour by early detection and weak analysis issues so as to emphasise key reflexive references and method. However, most of this material is taken from domains rather untypical of Rosennean debates and in addition would need to be completed by a series of supportive cases, but that is beyond the scope and scale of this paper.
Practical implications
The paper sets clear distinctions and boundaries for when and when not to apply reflexive steps in a foresight exercise, including in the context of rolling out a Rosen type of approach. Research decision making both in the corporate and policy‐making contexts can benefit from such clues and supportive framework conditions.
Social implications
Social systems are typically complex and involve multiple perspectives and viewpoints; they concern a series of major challenges to be coped with locally or more globally, at environmental, political, cultural or technological level, and in that category of anticipatory endeavor, the framing/meta‐framing epistemic couple may be of great usefulness.
Originality/value
Although rather conceptual, the detour proposed by the paper aims at creating a reflexive distance and enriched capability to evaluate one's potential biases and blind spots in anticipatory modelling activities.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to lay a theoretical basis for discussion of the ways by which organized foresight can be employed in the service of pro-poor objectives. This is in line with the fundamental mandate of the Rockefeller Foundation, dating from its establishment. Design/methodology/approach – The objective was to capture concepts that the author has been developing and teaching under the heading of “Forward engagement”. Forward engagement is a particular approach to anticipatory governance, drawing upon complexity theory for assessment of issues requiring government policy; network theory for proposed reforms to legacy systems of governance to enable them to manage complexity under conditions of accelerating change; and cybernetic theory to propose feedback systems to allow ongoing measurement of the performance of policies against expectations. For more detail, visit www.forwardengagement.org. Findings – The paper sketches out some core elements of a system for anticipatory governance. Originality/value – In addition to the primary findings of forward engagement (see web site), this paper argues that foresight and anticipatory concepts can play a vital role, not only for governance in the United States, but for governance in developing countries: perhaps even more so, because such countries have narrower margins for response to significant changes of circumstance.
Rationality is identified as the paradigm that dominated planning and related disciplines until the mid-1950s. Subsequent attacks on the rational model revealed anomalies that have led to loss of professional identity and ambiguous roles for planners. Responses to paradigm breakdown include 'the ritual response,' 'avoidance,' 'abandonment,' and search for a new paradigm. Each response is described and examined for its potential to yield a usable replacement for the rational model. No such replacement appears imminent, but a contingent approach within the framework of a new meta-theory of decision making may offer the best prospects.
The paper contributes to the research on understanding local global warming politics. Strategic documents from The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) are analysed to show how CCPC has constructed climate change protection as a local issue. The paper's premise is that the climate change issue must be translated or framed to enable actors to work with this problem in a local context, and that successful framing requires establishing a coherent method of describing social reality. CCPC emphasises that the different elements of local and global sustainable development agendas can be mutually reinforcing, and that climate change protection can be reconciled with local priorities and initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases (GHG). It is argued that this framing of climate change makes it difficult to see why and how climate change should be an important concern for local communities. The modest reductions of GHG in CCPC cities thus far highlights that finding meaningful new ways of linking the global and the local should be a core concern of CCPC.
Climate change adaptation and mitigation decisions made by governments are usually taken in different policy domains. At the individual level however, adaptation and mitigation activities are undertaken together as part of the management of risk and resources. We propose that a useful starting point to develop a national climate policy is to understand what societal response might mean in practice. First we frame the set of responses at the national policy level as a trade off between investment in the development and diffusion of new technology, and investment in encouraging and enabling society to change its behaviour and or adopt the new technology. We argue that these are the pertinent trade-offs, rather than those usually posited between climate change mitigation and adaptation. The preference for a policy response that focuses more on technological innovation rather than one that focuses on changing social behaviour will be influenced by the capacity of different societies to change their greenhouse gas emissions; by perceived vulnerability to climate impacts; and by capacity to modify social behaviour and physical environment. Starting with this complete vision of response options should enable policy makers to re-evaluate the risk environment and the set of response options available to them. From here, policy makers should consider who is responsible for making climate response decisions and when actions should be taken. Institutional arrangements dictate social and political acceptability of different policies, they structure worldviews, and they determine the provision of resources for investment in technological innovation and social change. The importance of focussing on the timing of the response is emphasised to maximise the potential for adjustments through social learning and institutional change at different policy scales. We argue that the ability to respond to climate change is both enabled and constrained by social and technological conditions. The ability of society to respond to climate change and the need for technological change for both decarbonisation and for dealing with surprise in general, are central to concepts of sustainable development.
This study examines opportunitie s for and obstacles to the mitigation of climate change in US cities using the example of the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) campaign sponsored by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. The CCP experience suggests a number of ways in which municipal governments can control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also highlights several obstacles that make it dif � cult for local of � cials to do so. First, climate change is generally framed as a global issue. The CCP experience suggests that climate change is most likely to be reframed as a local issue when the preferred policy response (controlling GHG emissions) can be linked to issues (e.g. air quality) already on the local agenda. Secondly, even when local governments recognise that they should do something to control GHG emissions, institutiona l barriers make it dif � cult for municipalitie s to move from political rhetoric to policy action. Finally, it is questionable whether local initiatives can make meaningful contribution s to climate change mitigation in the absence of policy changes at the state and national levels.
This Article explores the feasibility of using "givings recapture mechanisms" to promote effective land use management on coastal floodplains. Specifically, current government responses to floods and flood risks - typified by regulatory restrictions on floodplain land use, structural protections, and flood insurance or disaster relief - transfer substantial "givings" to private property owners. These givings have dramatically increased the value of coastal properties and continue to promote or maintain in place unwise and unsustainable coastal floodplain development. Ironically, increased coastal property values resulting from such givings have rendered prohibitively costly one land use management technique that has proven effective at reducing flood losses - public acquisition of high-risk or environmentally sensitive private property. While many scholars and commentators have approached this problem from the perspective of eliminating subsidization of floodplain development, my analysis is unique in that it recommends that government attempt to recapture past givings by offsetting those givings as a credit against the compensation the government must pay when it acquires private floodplain property. Such an approach would protect legitimate investment-backed expectations of landowners while effecting a long-term retreat from coastal floodplains threatened by rising sea levels and increasing hurricane risks.