Climate Adaptation in Practice: How Mainstreaming Strategies Matter for Policy Integration

With some level of climate change now inevitable, climate policy around the world has evolved in recent decades to include adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most industrialised countries have formulated national adaptation strategies to meet this challenge. However, the implementation of on-the-ground measures is lagging. To analyse the implementation process and possible reasons for this implementation gap, we take a closer look at how the integration of adaptation goals into various sectoral policies—often called mainstreaming—has been handled on different administrative levels in Switzerland. Going beyond traditional compilations of barriers to climate change adaptation, we analyse the use of six different mainstreaming strategies across cases and levels and the reasons for their success or lack thereof. We find that several actors at different jurisdictional levels have successfully employed two of these strategies in combination, focusing on inter-organizational cooperation and integrating aspects related to adaptation into collaborative projects or programmes to foster horizontal cooperation. We call this strategy cooperative mainstreaming because it focuses on avoiding conflicts between sectors by avoiding steep hierarchies in the process of defining, assigning and implementing adaptation policies and responsibilities. Some municipalities managed to channel the successes achieved through cooperative mainstreaming towards integrating adaptation goals into local policy programmes and laws. However, the lack of systematic regulatory adaptation mainstreaming on the national and cantonal levels or institutionalized higher-level support for local adaptation largely limits adaptation actions to those cases where the major impetus derives from extreme events or proactive individuals on the ground. We conclude that the adaptation implementation gap in Switzerland largely relates to the lack of political and financial commitment to climate change adaptation on the national and cantonal levels.