Integrating Climate Adaptation into Local Policymaking: Comparing Approaches in Danish Municipalities

As climate change is becoming ever more evident through storms, flooding or draughts, climate adaptation presents an urgent challenge to policy makers. The impact of climate change is multifaceted, therefore adaptation to climate change requires coordinated responses across multiple policy sectors, and climate adaptation objectives therefore need to be broadly integrated into plans, policies and actions. However, as a crosscutting policy issue, climate adaptation risks falling between established jurisdictional boundaries, where it will have to compete for attention and resources with sector-specific policy objectives, and where it is the responsibility of no one, a problem referred to as underlap in the coordination literature (Wegric and Stimac 2014). A typical measure would be to establish an organizational structure with climate adaptation responsibility; this might ensure ownership and attention to the issue within that unit, but does not ensure joint action across organizational boundaries (Wegrich and Stimac 2014; Hood 1974) or common framings of adaptation challenges across the policy institution. An alternative approach would be to build organizational routines and procedures that would eventually foster an organizational norm to integrate climate adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the influence of organizational structure, routines and procedures on the capacity of Danish local governments to integrate and coordinate climate adaptation objectives and actions in relevant policy sectors, in a comparative study of four Danish coastal municipalities that differ with regards to their institutional set-up and approaches to climate adaptation. Danish municipalities offer good cases because climate change impact is evident at the local level, and Danish municipalities are generally large and have broad policy responsibilities. We thus ask how organizational structures and organizational routines, respectively, influence the integration of climate adaptation and the institutional capacity for policy coordination at the local level. The case studies use qualitative document analysis and interview data.