Do We Need Disaster to Prepare for Climate Change? The Impact of Natural Disasters on Local Political Agendas Exemplified by Flood Events in Switzerland

Climate change calls for policy change in various sectors where the risk of natural hazards is increasing. One such sector is flood protection. Literature suggests that policy change is often triggered by natural disasters, which suggests that policies are adopted reactively rather than in a precautionary manner. By contrast, the policy change literature describes alternative pathways of learning and change from within policy subsystems. In this paper, we contrast reactive to precautionary policy change by asking: Which factors determine whether local Swiss parliaments address the topic of flood protection on their agenda? We distinguish precautionary drivers of policy change, including the publishing of scientific reports and national-level policy changes, from reactive drivers, i.e., the occurrence of damaging flood events. We created a dataset of cantonal parliamentary sessions and analyzed the occurrence of sessions addressing floods. We then investigate the drivers of agenda setting by combining a logistic regression analysis, an egocentric relational event model and a descriptive analysis. Our results show that parliamentary sessions addressing floods are most likely after flood events with large damages, but that also the publishing of scientific reports and national policy change are followed by discussions on flood protection in some cases. Additionally, we show that cantons differ considerably in their reaction to damaging flood events. The results indicate that flood protection policies are mostly adapted reactively in the analyzed cases. This finding can be used as an entry point to reflect on how current agenda setting pathways can be transformed to prepare for increasing risks by means of precautionary policies. Moreover, it provides a basis for subsequent research on agenda setting and policy change on a local level regarding climate-related topics.