Interplay of National, Regional and Local Actions and Actors in Diffusing Adaptation to Climate Change

Nearly all European countries have adopted national climate adaptation strategies and a fair number have also put adaptation plans in place. These documents supposedly guide action at the regional and local level, but empirical findings show that the awareness of the national adaptation policies varies greatly between regions, societal sectors and municipalities. In Finland local actors in sectors with strong central policy making such as water management and flood protection are aware of national sector policies and also depend on centrally produced information and guidance for adaptation to climate change. For example, projection of flood frequencies and design criteria for infrastructure are not invented locally. Other sectors, such as land use, city planning or health care have strong regional and local actors, who may be only weakly aware of any national climate change adaptation initiatives. Actors in these sectors may, nevertheless, develop adaptation actions in response to local needs, often after extreme weather events such as a storms or a cloud bursts with significant local impacts. These local adaptation actions may eventually become formalised in local planning and practice. The different processes through which adaptation actions are introduced suggest different mechanisms of diffusion. Centrally guided actions include a certain amount of coercion through, for example, the identification of nationally significant flood risk areas, but learning also plays a role as there is a need for fitting into a local context. The adaptations actions that emerge locally are likely to diffuse only slowly as typical diffusion mechanisms such as emulation, learning or competition are ineffective, if the reason for the adaptation action is very local. This may change, if networks of local actors are formed so that cognitive-institutional diffusion starts to take effect through the identification of analogous conditions. It may be enhanced by a formal central push that makes regional authorities draft regional climate plans, which make local initiative visible beyond their origin. The coercion doesn’t in this case focus on the adaptation action itself, but creates a favourable context for learning. We explore how different diffusion mechanisms interact and how they influence the effectiveness of national climate adaptation strategies, in particular in those sectors that lack their own strong central agents and policies for adaptation to climate change.