Measuring Policy Capacity in Europe: a QCA of Climate Adaptation Plans in Turbulent Times

In a context of rampant instability and turbulence, delivering effective climate governance becomes an imperative endeavour and necessitates sound research and evidence to support it. Apart from mitigation efforts, relevant instruments can either be adaptation strategies or adaptation plans: while strategies are flexible and non-binding documents, plans are instead practical executions of the strategies, detailing the resources allocated and the designated actors needed to meet predetermined targets. It is the latter ones that we focus on here. In this article, we propose an index that is based on Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) and a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is performed in order to rigorously operationalise our elaborations. This is achieved with regard to European countries and by analysing Climate Change Adaptation Plans (CCAPs) of selected countries. In particular, systemic analytical capacities are our core interest and we intend them as the sets of skills, resources and institutional arrangements with which key tasks in policy-making are structured and supported. In this case, CCAPs are our proxy for high systemic analytical capacity and we contend that such a choice can be useful to answer our research questions investigating the configuration of conditions for such capacity. A CCAP is the end product of a complex process that requires and demonstrates a high level of systemic analytical capacities: either managing complexity, or using scientific data and long-term planning, enhancing multi-stakeholder coordination, or mobilising specialised expertise. We acknowledge that multiple pathways can lead to the presence of a CCAP, but we assume systemic analytical capacity as the determining factor. The focus on policy capacity is much needed: indeed, formal commitments by many countries coexist with persistent gaps between declared ambition and actual implementation, which is the object of our inquiry. The paper offers two main contributions. First, it isolates the systemic analytical dimension of policy capacity and captures how well a system gathers information, interprets signals and acts accordingly. Second, the index hereby developed ranks the 23 European countries under scrutiny and indicates that Nordic countries score the highest, while many Eastern and Mediterranean countries rank lower. Given these usual suspects, our dataset allows researchers to study climate adaptation across countries and potentially also over time, in a comparative perspective. Our proposal tries to transcend the specificities of cases, allowing to move beyond individual expertise of professionals and assess the extent to which a national government as a whole is equipped to generate, disseminate, and act upon policy-relevant knowledge.