Carrie L. Mitchell

The role of boundary organizations in climate change adaptation from the perspective of municipal practitioners

City planners have an opportunity to act as agents of change to build resilience within their cities to respond to climate change. This article builds on urban climate governance research and organizational change theory to focus on how city planners’ partnerships with boundary organizations influence adaptation planning. At the root of effective urban climate governance is the integration of science and policy. Boundary organizations offer a governance approach that disseminates knowledge, builds capacity, and engages more participants in the adaptation planning process. However, little is known about how these partnerships foster adaptation at the local scale. Using a case study in Metro Vancouver, this study investigated how boundary organizations can better influence municipal adaptation action. The results of this study demonstrated that boundary organizations were perceived as more influential when they were credible, legitimate, and salient as well as when they provided action-oriented support. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the literature by illustrating how boundary organizations operate at the sub-regional scale to foster adaptation and proposing tangible practices to improve the effectiveness of partnerships.

Weathering the storm: The politics of urban climate change adaptation planning:

On 17 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in East Texas. Over a four-day period, catastrophic flooding displaced 30,000 people and led to at least 50 deaths. While much of the media coverage of this extreme weather event was concerned with immediate impacts (see, for example, Sanchez et al., 2017), there were also rumblings about the role of city planning, or lack thereof, in the devastating floods experienced in Houston (Boburg and Reinhard, 2017). City officials’ resistance to enacting more stringent building codes; stalled progress on flood-control projects; city residents’ rejection of city-wide zoning; the paving of coastal and prairie wetlands; lack of comprehensive flood planning across the 34 municipalities of Harris County, which includes Houston; and other aspects of physical geography collectively may have facilitated the perfect storm (Boburg and Reinhard, 2017). Houston, however, is not alone in its zeal for rapid, unregulated, urban development. The shunning of state regulation and public sector-led planning in favor of ‘‘neoliberal urbanism’’ is underway globally, albeit in different forms (Harvey, 2011; Peck et al., 2009; Theodore et al., 2011). Scholars have explored this urban phenomenon in American cities for decades (see, for example, Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Hackworth, 2007; Smith, 2002). We see similar political economy patterns internationally. A defining characteristic of contemporary urban development in many Asian cities, for example, is the relative power of the private sector in urban and regional planning and the weakening of existing land development codes (Marks and Lebel, 2016; Shatkin, 2008). Take, for example, the Indonesian property developer, Ciputra, who built a 1200 hectare upscale waterfront development in an area specified in Jakarta’s land use plan as ‘‘protected green zone’’ and ‘‘off-limits’’ for development (Leaf, 2015). In Thailand, weakening of existing land development codes has enabled the overbuilding of Bangkok, particularly in ‘‘green zones’’ and in floodways, with serious implications for urban flooding (Marks and Lebel, 2016). Interestingly, the field of climate change adaptation has, for the most part, developed independently of critical urban studies scholarship and planning theory, despite the placebased nature of adaptation actions. This disconnect may stem from the fact that climate change adaptation research evolved out of studies of the biophysical impacts of

Tipping Toward Transformation: Progress, Patterns and Potential for Climate Change Adaptation in the Global South

In response to observed and projected climate change impacts, major donors are funding an abundance of climate change research in the global South. The product of these funding schemes is often an abundance of cases with little attention paid to capturing the broader trends and patterns across cases. Furthermore, calls are increasingly being made for both adaptation and mitigation policies that are transformative: strategies that tackle the roots of vulnerability and high carbon development pathways to create a more fundamental shift towards sustainability. In this paper, we assess 54 cases of donor-funded adaptation research in the global South to paint a detailed picture of the types of adaptation options being proposed and implemented, their scope and the intended beneficiaries. We consider these data through the lens of transformation: to what extent do these cases illustrate adaptation actions that might push the social-ecological system over a tipping point towards a more desirable, sustainable state? Ultimately, we find that the adaptation options in these cases focus on educational or behavioral campaigns rather than deeper governance, legislative, or economic shifts. Similarly, the scale of action most often targets communities, rather than ecosystems, watershed, or regional/national scales. Even so, the emergence of resilience thinking in some projects, and the potential for a values shift triggered by these projects may sow the seeds of a longer-term transformation, if more attention is paid to synergies between development objectives and climate change actions.

Understanding climate change and resilience: assessing strengths and opportunities for adaptation in the Global South

Better integration of resilience and climate change adaptation can help building climate-resilient development. Yet, resilience and adaptation to climate change have evolved largely along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization. Conceptual vagueness around resilience makes it challenging to ascertain what elements of resilience thinking have the greatest potential to enhance climate change adaptation and contribute to broader sustainable development goals. This article distills nine principles from the resilience literature to build a framework to assess 224 climate change adaptation strategies proposed by researchers and practitioners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our analysis concludes that adaptation strategies in this data set emphasize initiatives that increase social and ecological diversity, strengthen learning processes, build functional redundancy, enhance connectivity between social and ecological elements, pay attention to the management of slow variables, and provide mechanisms for increasing participation and polycentric governance. At the same time, the adaptation options examined generally lacked a system’s perspective, suggesting that there is still important work ahead to move toward a climate-resilient development model.

Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Chandler & Coaffee, 2016). Whilst there is a variety of different interpretations given to resilience from practitioners and an open debate about resilience principles and characteristics in academia, we adopt the crisis and disaster management definition of “the capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, 2010; p. 9). By developing resilience, a system becomes capable of reducing the impact of shocks and resuming normal functioning more quickly following a disaster and better equipped to meet population needs and minimise economic losses caused by crises (Lagadec, 2009; Meerow, Newell, & Stults, 2016). However, it should be noted that this definition fails to capture preexisting socio-economic inequities within society and that in many countries “negotiated resilience” may be desirable (Ziervogel et al., 2017). Moreover, in the rapidly emerging policy discourse of resilience, cities and urban areas have become a key focus of action where rapid urbanisation and greater global connectedness present unprecedented challenges. Such increased urbanisation also concentrates risk in cities making them increasingly vulnerable to an array of shocks and stresses. Under such circumstances, city managers are increasingly seeking to enhance urban resilience by addressing underlying risk factors, and by reducing the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets to a range of current and future threats. In this sense urban resilience provides different frameworks for reducing the multiple risks faced by cities and communities, ensuring there are appropriate levels of resources and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a range of shocks and stresses (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). Many initiatives organised through global governance networks promote the importance of city-based resilience whilst a range of private sector and philanthropic organisations have advanced programmes of work and frameworks by which cities might develop the capacities to become more resilient. Most notably, major cities throughout the world have joined the 100 Resilient Cities programme (http://www. 100resilientcities.org/) (Rockefeller Foundation & Arup, 2015), pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, to develop resilience strategies to face disruptive events and address vulnerabilities that amplify crises and erode coping abilities (e.g., inequality, ageing infrastructure, environmental degradation) (100 Resilient Cities, 2016). Organisations of the United Nations are also urging the development of operational frameworks for dealing with integrated risks management, as the UN Habitat City Resilience Profiling Programme, enhancing resilient communities building in relation to Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (UN, 2015) that followed the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters (ISDR, 2005). However, empirical studies show that despite the popularity of resilience, its implementation sometimes lead to business as usual approaches neglecting social justice (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Ziervogel et al., 2017), or lock-in the development path through unsustainable trajectories, and thus resulting in a complex and underestimated set of trade-offs across spatial and temporal scales (Chelleri, Waters, Olazabal, & Minucci, 2015). This implementation gap (Coaffee & Clarke, 2015) remains between resilience as ambitious objective and the “demonstrated capacity to govern resilience in practice” at the urban level (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015; p. 1265). The implementation of resilience challenges the normal functioning of public administrations (Bourgon, 2009; Duit, 2016) by highlighting the need to replace silos with horizontal management (Matyas & Pelling, 2015), take interdependence with external partners into account (Henstra, 2012; McConnell & Drennan, 2006; Valiquette L’Heureux & Therrien, 2013), and encourage flexible and adaptive processes rather than regular routines that maintain the status quo (Pelling & Manuel-Navarrete, 2011; Stark, 2014). Whilst from a governance perspective we can readily acknowledge that “the building of urban resilience will be most effective when it involves a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy” (Coaffee, Murakami-Wood, & Rogers, 2008), municipal authorities are undoubtedly struggling to do so. In seeking to identify the different knowledge gaps and future research questions regarding the implementation of urban resilience we ran a 3-day intensive knowledge-brokering workshop on Co-constructing Knowledge for Urban Resilience Implementation at the Ecole nationale DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12233

Is carbon financing trashing integrated waste management? Experience from Indonesia

In this paper we detail the results of two carbon financing composting projects in Indonesia, which ran from 2007 to 2012. Findings from these projects suggest that the clean development mechanism (CDM) is not well suited for small scale, community based, composting due to a number of barriers, including: the large amount of up-front funding required for financing the registration process; the current methodology for measuring methane; and the baseline reporting required for registration. This paper also highlights a troubling trend, whereby the CDM incentivizes less environmentally sustainable waste management practices. In Indonesia, this has the potential to undermine the national waste management law and thwart local efforts towards integrated waste management. We conclude with recommendations for the CDM in the waste and waste handling sector, including: subsidizing the registration costs for community-based projects, simplifying baseline and monitoring requirements for composting projects, and improving the existing methodology for calculation of landfill emissions.

Planning for adaptation to climate change: exploring the climate science-to-practice disconnect

Available science on climate change has increased significantly in recent years, yet its effective transfer to planning practice, particularly cities in the global South, is still limited. This paper explores the climate science-to-planning practice disconnect in the context of climate change adaptation in Southeast Asian cities generally, and Manila, Philippines specifically. We pose two simple, but important, questions: (1) what information do planning practitioners currently use to develop adaptive urban responses to climate change; and, (2) what additional knowledge and resources do planning practitioners need to effectively plan for climate change in the future? Survey and interview data collected across the Philippines suggest that planning professionals perceive access to, and sharing of, information as critical issues. Moreover, planning professionals contend that challenges with financial, technical, and staff resources, which have been perennial challenges of environmental management in Southeast Asia, persist despite significant new funding specifically earmarked for climate change adaptation. The climate science-to-practice disconnect, however, should be viewed as more than just an information/allocation deficit. Incomplete decentralization, haphazard urbanization, and the privatization of planning thwart attempts to translate climate science to planning practice in globalizing cities. As such, we argue that planning for adaptation to climate change requires more than just more and better information. It requires tackling the fundamental contradictions of planning in complex, globalizing cities.