Drivers of policy 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 adapt to current and future climate change. Despite increasing calls for transformation, many policy sectors remain slow or even resistant to change, and limited climate action prevails. Yet, current understanding of the drivers and determinants of policy inaction remains arguably limited. To address this gap, we rely on the concept of policy lock-ins. From this perspective, policy inaction 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 necessarily 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. With this study, we aim to advance this perspective by specifying patterns of lock-in mechanisms that determine policy inaction in the field of climate adaptation through a crossed, comparative design, applying set-theoretic analysis. We rely on a framework of four policy mechanisms – normalization, capacity building, coalition building, and asset accumulation – potentially driving lock-ins and together determining policy inaction. We explore these in the realm of climate adaptation, 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. By means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) we distill archetypical patterns of how these mechanisms co-occur and identify overarching patterns of climate policy lock-in. Our results highlight how particularly the lack of capacity building in tandem with one of the other mechanisms determine climate policy inaction, emphasizing the special role of knowledge dynamics within the policy process. Understanding these dynamics provides the fundament for fostering those capacities that are instrumental for overcoming inaction and closing the climate adaptation gap.