The Politics of Climate Adaptation Policies in Europe

Abstract

Climate adaptation has become a central component of climate policy agendas across Europe. Yet, compared to the extensive political science literature on climate mitigation, support bases for climate policies or the determinants of climate mitigation policies, scholarly explanations of climate adaptation policy remain comparatively underdeveloped (Schwander & Fischer 2025). There is still limited political science studies of how adaptation policies are developed, diffused, implemented, and, in particular, of how political institutions and dynamics at the national level shape the diversity, direction, and scope of adaptation policies across Europe. Other fields, such as sociology have started to engage with these politics of adaptation, and how for example post-disaster relocation is triggering asset revualation that have the potential to change the structure of a society (Elliott 2021). Studies of participatory politics (Stadelmann-Steffen 2011) or environmental justice movements (Patterson et al. 2018) also provide critical insights into the politics of engaging with environmental problems and the importance of social justice. The role of beliefs and behaviour is getting under scrutiny, such as the impact of disasters on voting behaviours (Gaikwad et al. 2022; Sloggy et al. 2021), but overal effects remain unclear. However, such insights are dispersed, impacts on policies and politics often not systematised, and explanations often heterogeneous. This gap is especially consequential in the current political context. As European societies experience growing contestation and backlash around climate policies (Toygür & Sojka 2025), it is essential to bring politics back into climate adaptation analysis. Adaptation policies often enjoy higher public support than climate mitigation, yet they tend to receive less political attention and remain weakly politicised, thereby raising the question of how do these policies fare in the face of the current climate backlash. Understanding the political dynamics underpinning adaptation policymaking is therefore urgent, both empirically and theoretically. The absence of a strong theoretical account of adaptation is particularly striking given Europe’s complex system of multi-level governance and the inherently distributive and conflictual nature of adaptation. Existing research has made important contributions by analysing adaptation plans, policy instruments, and governance arrangements (G. R. Biesbroek et al. 2010; R. Biesbroek 2021; Henstra 2016). However, this work has often left unexplored how party systems, electoral incentives, institutional configurations, and power relations shape adaptation choices. Much of the literature remains centred on the adoption of climate adaptation plan, while adaptation unfolds across a broader range of policy subsystems—such as environmental risk and disaster governance, urban policy, social policy, and welfare systems—raising questions about how these specific subsystems evolve in response to climate change, and how climate adaptation works and what political factors play in each adaptation policy subsystems. Theoretically, this calls for stronger foundations to analyse adaptation as a political process shaped by institutional choice, distributional conflict, and competing policy priorities. This panel seeks to advance political science research on climate adaptation by foregrounding political institutions, actors, and politics. It invites contributions that analyse adaptation as a site of political struggle, contested policy making, and institutional change within and beyond Europe.

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