Local leadership in front of climate change adaptation

Climate change is increasingly considered to be an important challenge for local governance. The local response to climate change vary not only due to climate change vulnerability, but also due to the risk perception of local actors and their willingness to act. Therefore differences in politico-administrative culture become crucial in analyzing reactions to this new challenge. The paper presents selected results of a Norwegian-Polish project investigating the factors that may influence climate change local adaptation capacity in Poland and Norway. Analyzing political steering of local climate adaptation policies in two so various countries allows us to study the influence of two important variables: differences in politico-administrative cultures and in types of local leadership (referring to Mouritzen-Svara 2002 and Heinelt-Hlepas 2006 classifications). Poland represents a model which is close to traditional “strong-mayor”, while Norway, being party of the Nordic type of local government system (Loughlin 2003) is closer to collective leadership model which is more embedded in the dominance of political parties. As regards administrative culture we expect differences arising from strong professionalization of the local bureaucracy in Norway, while more political-administrative inter-linkages in Poland which results in more direct subordination of administrative staff on Polish politicians and less active role of bureaucrats in feeding political agenda. Due to both of those factors (types of leadership and politico-administrative culture) we assume that the role of mayors in adaptation policy differs a lot between Poland and Norway. We expect more political entrepreneurship in Poland, and more administrative entrepreneurship in Norway. Moreover, we also look for other preconditions explaining variation in steering of adaptation policy, such as size of a municipality, risks that a municipality experiences and affluence of a municipality. The study uses quantitative data from municipal surveys carried out in both countries, as well as qualitative material from case studies conducted in four Polish and three Norwegian cities.