Drivers of stagnation – A set-theoretic analysis of the determinants of climate adaptation policy lock-ins

With the climate crisis looming large over the world’s societies, immediate action is required to prepare for and adapt to current and future climate change. Despite increasing calls for action, certain policy sectors remain slow or even resistant to change, and limited action on the part of policy makers and authorities prevails. Current understanding of the drivers and determinants of such policy inaction remains arguably limited, with research tending to identify static ‘barriers’ to adaptation. However, to go beyond these narrow, linear barriers, more recently the concept of climate adaptation policy lock-ins has been brought forward. From this perspective, the adaptation gap is determined by path-dependent dynamics of self-reinforcing mechanisms that narrow the opportunity space for alternative actions and potentially lock in specific pathways within policy subsystems. Such self-reinforcing mechanisms are not limited to the political realm but emphasize the feedbacks that link policy decisions and institutions to infrastructures and technologies, as well as human behavior, routines, and practices. Together, these constitute strong forces of path-dependency and system rigidity that stabilize incumbent paradigms and policies, blocking changes necessary for climate adaptation. With this study, we aim to advance the lock-in perspective by exploring the systemic drivers that determine these self-reinforcing dynamics through a crossed, comparative design, applying set-theoretic analysis. Considering 18 cases comprising of six climate adaptation problem domains (coastal protection, water scarcity, forestry, biodiversity conservation, heat stress, mental health after extreme weather events) in three countries (UK, Netherlands, Germany) each, we pay particular attention to the institutional, physical, and societal resources that are maintaining incumbent policies and paradigms. Such resources include e.g. dominant types of knowledge, socio-cultural beliefs, or governance architectures, that together are at the center of lock-in dynamics and drive their reproduction. By means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) we distill archetypical patterns of how these resources co-occur in order to identify overarching patterns of drivers of lock-in dynamics. Understanding these dynamics provides the fundament for designing transformative policies and fostering those specific capacities of adaptiveness and reflexivity that are instrumental for closing the climate adaptation gap.