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In the context of global environmental change, radical policy change is often called for. Experts are frequently involved and can act as policy entrepreneurs to make such change happen. This paper presents an analysis of a historical case where radical policy change took place at large scale, namely the development of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). In this endeavor, experts were deeply embedded in the designing of radical new policies. First, we demonstrate for the first time how experts can act as policy entrepreneurs alongside the EU Commission, and insist on the importance of not neglecting the agency of experts in EU radical policy change. Second, we elaborate on the complexity of the interactions between the policy and politics streams of Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework. In his framework, Kingdon describes the policy process as three parallel streams (a problem, a policy and politics) where policy entrepreneurs are the ones ‘’making the coupling of the streams’’ (Kingdon, 1984, p188). However, we argue that there is more to understand from the actual processes that make the streams entangled and allow for policy change to become a reality. We propose the concept of transcoding from the STS literature to illustrate the action of policy entrepreneurs in bridging the policy and politics streams. With this concept, we intend to show the processes that translate scientifically endorsed approaches and understandings into policy decisions, and to open new research possibilities in complement to the Multiple Stream Framework.

This article contributes to the literature on environmental policy controversies. We utilize an Argumentative Discourse Analysis (ADA)-based approachto analyze the struggle for discursive hegemony that took place between competing story-lines in the context of the acid mine drainage (AMD) environmental policy problem, located in the gold mining areas of greater Johannesburg, South Africa. With this article we make a theoretical contribution by presenting and applying an adapted ADA framework strongly focused on the operationalization of key ADA concepts. Our empirical contribution lies in providing a rich and deep analysis of an environmental policy controversy that has not yet been studied from an ADA perspective. In particular, we demonstrate and discuss the complex path to discourse institutionalization followed by the dominant emergent AMD story-line. In conclusion, we recommend steps for updating the ADA approach and developing an accompanying set of guidelines to further enable the operationalization of its concepts.

Responding to current and future climate change demands urgent, transformative adaptation, yet in many policy systems inaction continues to prevail. This paper examines apparent resistance to policy change and the persistence of business-as-usual through a ‘lock-in perspective’, which means that attention is paid to how reinforcing mechanisms drive stabilisation and resistance in policy systems. Offering a fresh synthesis of known lock-in mechanisms in the literature, this paper explores the role of those mechanisms in two empirical cases of coastal adaptation: England (U.K.) and Schleswig-Holstein (Germany). While several known lock-mechanisms are observable, some are newly identified in this adaptation context. We offer a critical reflection on the added value of the lock-in perspective for understanding policy stability. In turn, the identification of self- and mutually reinforcing mechanisms provides a much-needed foundation for targeted policy interventions and efforts to ‘unlock’ climate adaptation pathways.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) remains one of the leading conceptual models in the policy sciences because it continues to be revised and updated as required. A focus area of the ACF that requires further theorization is the roles of experts and expert-based information in influencing policy problem contexts. Our article takes a necessary step in this direction by (1) evaluating the usefulness of Weible’s expectations regarding the uses of expert-based information in different types of policy subsystems and factors that contribute to shifts from one subsystem to another; and (2) making critical observations that result from this evaluation in the context of the controversial acid mine drainage policy case study in South Africa. The findings of our case study analysis indicate that Weible’s framework performed reasonably well but also revealed opportunities for further improvement. We therefore suggest adding awareness raising as a use of expert-based information, developing a typology of different types of experts who participate in policy subsystems, and including a focus on the use of expert-based information in policy subsystem shifts. We also reflect upon the relevance and importance of continuing to expand ACF applications to countries outside of North America and Western Europe.

Participatory processes provide opportunities for stakeholders such as: scientists, policy makers and citizens to meet, exchange information, deliberate and share values. The artefacts through which the water professionals (scientists and policy makers) and the other stakeholders can enable these participatory processes are defined as tools. There is a diversity of rapidly evolving tools for supporting the process of designing nature-based solutions (NbS) together with the stakeholders (participatory designing). This, however, requires a systematic and informed selection to facilitate the adequate choice of tool, aligned to the requirements and context of the water professionals but also the stakeholders. Despite this, there is still little progress and knowledge accumulation over preferred tools. Moreover, while tailored participatory tools could facilitate and accelerate the design process of NbS, a comprehensive mapping of their availability and capacity to respond to the values, requirements and needs of the stakeholders is still missing.Consequently, in this research, we propose a stepwise framework for the use of tools as support in three interconnected processes: i) tools used for co-designing NbS with stakeholders - co-creation tools, ii) tools used for defining the hydro-meteorological hazards (HMH) and its effects with stakeholders – knowledge tools and iii) tools used for co-implementing the transition towards NbS – transition tools. We then test this stepwise framework in six brook catchments spread in four countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. The stepwise framework is designed in the following order: tool collection and selection; classification; grading and mapping. We are content that this stepwise framework could show how the water professionals, could make an informed selection and decision on the most suitable tool, based on the usability index of the tool for the specific stakeholder groups and the following criteria: tool category, objective of the tool, the required decision making process stage, the type of stakeholders, and the practical requirements (time, budget, number of participants).Therefore we designed and tested a framework that allows the water professionals to make a decision on which tool/s could be best used based on their usability but also in terms of their characteristics analysed and described from the water professionals/practitioners themselves. What further discussion on this framework might entail is regarding the trends that we notice in the Co-Adapt project, the limitations and what happens after the tool or suite of tools is applied based on actual field experiences.

Urban governance systems need to be adaptive to deal with emerging uncertainties and pressures, including those related to climate change. Realising adaptive urban governance systems requires attention to institutions, and in particular, processes of institutional innovation. Interestingly, understanding of how institutional innovation and change occurs remains a key conceptual weakness in urban climate change governance. This paper explores how institutional innovation in urban climate change governance can be conceptualised and analysed. We develop a heuristic involving three levels: (1) “visible” changes in institutional arrangements, (2) changes in underlying “rules-in-use”, and (3) the relationship to broader “governance dilemmas”. We then explore the utility of this heuristic through an exploratory case study of urban water governance in Santiago, Chile. The approach presented opens up novel possibilities for studying institutional innovation and evaluating changes in governance systems. The paper contributes to debates on innovation and its effects in urban governance, particularly under climate change.

The global water sector is changing and it is in need of more evidence-based responses of emerging global, regional, national and local challenges. Communities are seeking interventions which achieve multiple benefits and outcomes such as: improved quality of water bodies, reduced greenhouse emissions, reliably delivered water for human use but also some that are rather urgent like: flood-risk management. In order to take into account the environmental, technological, economic, institutional and cultural characteristics of river basins, we need to move from current management regimes towards more adaptive regimes with the use of Nature-based solutions (NbS) instead of traditional 'grey' engineering approaches. Quite a vast amount of tools have been developed throughout the years for achieving this transition. This paper identifies the challenges and opportunities that water professionals face when using these tools in the process of planning NbS. An online tailor-made approach, based on a modified nominal group technique (NGT) and Multi-criteria analysus (MCA) was developed and applied. The NGT-based assessment of these tools consists of two rounds during which participants were asked to reflect first individually, and then collectively about the prerequisites and implications of these tools in the process of planning NbS. The participants are water professionals from the European project Co-Adapt. Here we presented one approach where new scientific methods and practical tools are developed for participatory assessment and implementation of adaptive water management.

The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires EU member states to produce and implement river basin management plans, which are to be designed and updated via participatory processes that inform, consult with, and actively involve all interested stakeholders. The assumption of the European Commission is that stakeholder participation, and institutional adaptation and procedural innovation to facilitate it, are essential to the effectiveness of river basin planning and, ultimately, the environmental impact of the Directive. We analyzed official documents and the WFD literature to compare implementation of the Directive in EU member states in the initial WFD planning phase (2000-2009). Examining the development of participatory approaches to river basin management planning, we consider the extent of transformation in EU water governance over the period. Employing a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, we map the implementation "trajectories" of 13 member states, and then provide a detailed examination of shifts in river basin planning and participation in four member states (Germany, Sweden, Poland and France) to illustrate the diversity of institutional approaches observed. We identify a general tendency towards increased, yet circumscribed, stakeholder participation in river basin management in the member states examined, alongside clear continuities in terms of their respective pre-WFD institutional and procedural arrangements. Overall, the WFD has driven a highly uneven shift to river basin-level planning among the member states, and instigated a range of efforts to institutionalize stakeholder involvement-often through the establishment of advisory groups to bring organized stakeholders into the planning process.

This paper investigates how different dimensions of water – water as a public health concern, as an essential prerequisite for producing livelihoods, and as a cultural heritage or an element of spiritual practice – are taken up in international guidelines and certification schemes for the extractive sector. As a notoriously water-intensive economic activity, mining frequently infringes on other forms of water use. Simultaneously, the legal articulations and governance implications of the hydrological aspects of mining are complex, as commercial interactions associated with mining span the globe, governance efforts occur primarily at the national level and negative externalities manifest locally. Increasingly, transnational initiatives play a role in setting rules and norms for ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainable’ mining. We assess to what extent these rules and norms take into account the hydrological implications of mining, looking at eight guideline documents and ten certification schemes for mineral extraction that originate from international organizations, corporate groups, or multi-stakeholder initiatives. We then illustrate the influence of transnational institutions in two cases, one in Mongolia and one in South Africa. Our results show that water as a public health concern receives the most attention while water as a cultural heritage is reflected the least. However, all institutions in our sample that were devised over the last two years refer to the different dimensions of water use comprehensively.

In acknowledgement of the complexity of environmental challenges, research on learning in environmental policy has grown substantially over the past two decades across a range of disciplines. Despite this growth, there are few comprehensive assessments of the literature on learning in environmental policy. This article fills this gap by providing insights on the overall coherence and impact of this body of scholarship. To do so, we analyze a sample of 163 articles from 2004 to 2014 using a standardized coding framework. The results provide an in-depth assessment of the status of the literature on learning in the context of environmental policy, as well as the quality of the literature. We demonstrate that despite the diversity in research questions and goals, the literature is lacking with respect to diversity in cases and context, theoretical development, clear conceptualization and operationalization of learning, and advancements in empirical approaches to study learning. From these insights, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for scholars in studying learning and provide recommendations for building the theoretical and methodological rigor of the field.

Flooding is routinely among the most disastrous annual events worldwide with extensive impacts on human wellbeing, economies and ecosystems. Thus, how decisions are made about floods (i.e. flood go ...

This editorial highlights the diversity in studies of experimentation that aims for solutions to climate change and wider sustainability challenges. The diversity is reflected in the theoretical underpinnings, the agency behind experiments, the niches in which experimentation occurs, in the governance of the experiments and in experiments with governance, in the way experiments contribute to learning and sharing of knowledge across levels and scales. This implies that experimentation and experiments can contribute to transitions in very different ways and that experimentation also runs the risks of merely becoming a distraction that maintains status quo instead of contributing to transformative change. In moving forward research should explore the diversity even more, and critically evaluate and discuss the possible contributions to policy and polycentric governance.

Contains fulltext : 175882.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The purpose of this contribution is to turn an eye to the worldwide discussion on water governance of the past decades, and key innovations that have been proposed there. We do so because water is a major passion of Helen Ingram's, she is a critical follower of water governance innovations (see for instance Ingram, 2008), and she is a stern advocate for applying social science theory to water management issues (see, e.g., Blatter and Ingram, 2001). We also do so because water managers around the world are surrounded by increasingly uncertain and unpredictable social and ecological environments. 21 p.

This Commentary reflects on the state of the scholarship on learning for environmental and natural resource policy and governance. How have we been learning about learning? We highlight theoretical and empirical advancements related to learning, as well as areas of divergence between learning theories and frameworks, and underdeveloped knowledge around processes and outcomes. To address these limitations and improve progress in both theory and practice, we offer recommendations for learning scholarship by focusing on how to collectively engage in ‘learning about learning’.

Over the past decade, climate change adaptation has become an integral item on the climate policy agendas of several European countries. As such, researchers have begun to question what concrete changes in polices are occurring at national levels and what dynamics can explain these changes. While new laws, policies and institutions have been created to deliver adaptation, supported through processes of cross-national policy innovation and learning, another interesting observation being made is that adaptation is steadily emerging into a new separate and distinct policy field in a handful of countries. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to empirically map where and to what degree adaptation is emerging as a policy field; second, to theoretically and empirically explore the drivers underpinning policy field emergence. Based upon a survey of leading adaptation policy makers in 27 European countries, we show that there are signs of adaptation becoming a policy field in 15 countries. Furthermore, we find that even though institutional change, coupled with increasing public attention and pressure on governments to react to climate change, has helped drive the emergence of adaptation as a policy field, it would appear that it is the activities of elite policy makers and experts that have had the most influence.

This editorial sets the scene for a special issue on climate governance entrepreneurship at the local and regional levels. To make climate governance work, much policy activity is needed at the local and regional levels. Entrepreneurs are actors who aim to affect change by using their agency. They target policy decisions at the local and regional levels, which might subsequently turn to other governance levels to expand their influence. The scientific discussion about governance entrepreneurs is characterized by a lack of conceptual clarity, by methodological challenges, and by several research gaps. Regarding the latter, at present, it is especially unclear when and why entrepreneurs become active, which factors they take into account when they select their strategies, and what explains the effects of entrepreneurial activity on the emergence of innovations in climate governance. All contributions to this special issue engage with one or several of these conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges, thus advancing the state of art in the field. Highlights from the special issue include the development of a simple conceptual frame that connects actors, contexts, strategies, and outcomes in a systematic way. Some promising methodological avenues are described, since the special issue contains not only some qualitative case studies but also some studies that take a long-term perspective by following policy development for decades, and a study that proposes a census approach. Empirically, the contributions in this special issue shed light on a range of factors explaining levels of entrepreneurial activity, and they carefully trace impacts over time. We conclude by sketching an agenda for further work in this realm.

Constraining global climate change to 1.5°C is commonly understood to require urgent and deep societal transformations. Yet such transformations are not always viewed as politically feasible; finding ways to enhance the political feasibility of ambitious decarbonization trajectories is needed. This paper reviews the role of social justice as an organizing principle for politically feasible 1.5°C transformations. A social justice lens usefully focuses attention on first, protecting vulnerable people from climate change impacts, second, protecting people from disruptions of transformation, and finally, enhancing the process of envisioning and implementing an equitable post-carbon society. However, justice-focused arguments could also have unintended consequences, such as being deployed against climate action. Hence proactively engaging with social justice is critical in navigating 1.5°C societal transformations.

Despite the fact that we currently witness an increasing interest in the study of the role of agency in policy dynamics, it remains in many respects a puzzle how policy change can be explained, let alone directed. This paper focusses intently on the concept, incidence, and strategic behaviour of policy entrepreneurs. By elucidating their strategic modus operandi, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the strategies that individual change agents employ in their efforts to effect policy change, as well as to examine their contextual effectiveness. In addition to new data on the incidence and profile of policy entrepreneurs and the (contextual) conditions relating to the selection of strategies, this paper presents a novel typology of entrepreneurial strategies, linking these to circumstances under which they can be effective. Our paper concludes with a discussion on how our findings relate to the main theories of policy change, and what they mean for the larger democratic questions about accountability and legitimacy.

The 2015 Paris Agreement signals a new approach to global climate governance, in not only following a “pledge-and-review” approach to national action, but also in supporting climate action by non-state actors. This chapter examines how far this new approach can be deemed to be experimentalist by focusing on four elements drawn from the global experimentalist governance literature, namely: the setting of framework goals and metrics in an open, participatory process involving a broad group of stakeholders; decentralised implementation; distributed monitoring and reporting; and ongoing evaluation and revision of the goals and metrics in the light of experience. It concludes that the post-Paris climate governance architecture does display some of these elements. However, it suggests that this may mean either that climate governance eventually starts to resemble global experimentalist governance, or that the latter represents a type of lowest-common-denominator governance, where the outcomes are largely dependent on what nation states and non-state actors are willing to pledge. This finding calls for more attention to be paid to: the potential and underlying premises of the post-Paris model; power dynamics; the prevailing ontology (top-down or bottom-up); and the role of coordination.

Attention is increasing in academia towards the governance of adaptation, specifically how state and non-state actors are defining the adaptation ‘problematique’ and crafting public policies to address it. Adaptation is the ‘adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’. The challenge for governments is taking this rather vague concept and turning it into viable and implementable public policies. This implies that they have to make choices as to the types of polices to create, the sectors they should cover, ministerial jurisdictions and funding. This article contributes to the discussion on the adaptation governance by presenting a conceptual framework that outlines policy choices governors need to make, by applying this framework to a number of countries, and starting the debate on which choice or choices were particularly instrumental in shaping adaptation policy in particular countries as a whole. It focuses on four countries traditionally seen to be adaptation leaders: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

This is an introductory paper to a special issue on climate governance entrepreneurship, where entrepreneurship is understood as acts performed by actors seeking to ‘punch above their weight’. By contrast, actors who are merely doing their job are not ‘entrepreneurs’. In order to understand climate policy and governance, we need to learn more about the factors that condition variance in entrepreneurial activity, strategies and success. In this introduction, we present a comprehensive review of the literature on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in policy in governance, with special attention to the recent upsurge in studies of climate governance entrepreneurship. We distinguish two types of entrepreneurship: (1) acts aimed at enhancing governance influence by altering the distribution of authority and information; and (2) acts aimed at altering or diffusing norms and cognitive frameworks, worldviews or institutional logics. The contributions in this special issue offer valuable insights into how personal motivations, policy windows, international trends, cultural-institutional traditions and the distribution of structural power influence entrepreneurship. However, more work is needed – not least as regards whether actors that seek change are more active and/or more successful as entrepreneurs compared to those that defend the status quo, and whether there is more successful entrepreneurship in public or in private arenas of governance.

Adaptation to climate change is not only a technical issue; above all, it is a matter of governance. Governance is more than government and includes the totality of interactions in which public as well as private actors participate, aiming to solve societal problems. Adaptation governance poses some specific, demanding challenges, such as the context of institutional fragmentation, as climate change involves almost all policy domains and governance levels; the persistent uncertainties about the nature and scale of risks and proposed solutions; and the need to make short-term policies based on long-term projections. Furthermore, adaptation is an emerging policy field with, at least for the time being, only weakly defined ambitions, responsibilities, procedures, routines, and solutions. Many scholars have already shown that complex problems, such as adaptation to climate change, cannot be solved in a straightforward way with actions taken by a hierarchic or monocentric form of governance. This raises the question of how to develop governance arrangements that contribute to realizing adaptation options and increasing the adaptive capacity of society. A series of seven basic elements have to be addressed in designing climate adaptation governance arrangements: the framing of the problem, the level(s) at which to act, the alignment across sectoral boundaries, the timing of the policies, the selection of policy instruments, the organization of the science-policy interface, and the most appropriate form of leadership. For each of these elements, this chapter suggests some tentative design principles. In addition to effectiveness and legitimacy, resilience is an important criterion for evaluating these arrangements. The development of governance arrangements is always context- and time-specific, and constrained by the formal and informal rules of existing institutions.

Learning from policy experimentation is a promising way to approach the "wicked problem" of climate adaptation, which is characterised by knowledge gaps and contested understandings of future risk. However, although the role of learning in shaping public policy is well understood, and experiments are expected to facilitate learning, little is known about how experiments produce learning, what types of learning, and how they can be designed to enhance learning effects. Using quantitative researchmethods,we explore howdesign choices influence the learning experiences of 173 participants in 18 policy experiments conducted in the Netherlands between 1997 and 2016. The experiments are divided into three "ideal types" that are expected to produce different levels and types of learning. The findings show that policy experiments produce cognitive and relational learning effects, but less normative learning, and experiment design influenced three of six measured dimensions of learning, especially the cognitive learning dimensions. This reveals a trade-off between designing for knowledge development and designing for normative or relational changes; choices that experiment designers should make in the context of their adaptation problem. Our findings also show the role leadership plays in building trust.

Contains fulltext : 175884.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) The idea that ecosystem management should be approached at the bioregional scale is central to the thinking on adaptive governance. Taken to the domain of water management, a bioregional approach implies the foundation of river basin organizations (RBOs), a notion that has been warmly welcomed by scholars and practitioners alike. However, it appears that river basin organizations come in various shapes and sizes, their intended foundation often leads to resistance, and their actual performance is understudied. Through this special feature we seek to advance the state of our knowledge in this respect. Through this introduction we lay the foundation for the case studies that follow in the special feature and for the conclusions. We do so by presenting a worked typology of river basin organizations. This typology helps us differentiate between various kinds of proposals that are all referred to as river basin organizations, but that are actually quite different in nature. In addition, in this introduction we present an approach to dissecting the inevitable political debates that ensue once a proposal to found a river basin organization is made, something that is often ill understood by the proponents of river basin organizations. After this, we explain the criteria that one could use to assess the performance of river basin organizations that actually come into being. Although the thinking in adaptive governance is strongly concerned with ecological effectiveness, we do show that other criteria can be applied too. Finally, we briefly introduce the various contributions to the special feature. 16 p.

Polycentric governance involves multiple actors at multiple scales beyond the state. The potential of polycentric governance for promoting both climate mitigation and adaptation is well established. Yet, dominant conceptualizations of polycentric governance pay scant attention to how power dynamics affect the structure and the outcomes of climate action. We review emerging evidence on power within polycentric and distributed governance across the climate, forestry, marine, coastal, urban, and water sectors, and relate them to established positions on power within research on federalism, decentralization, international relations, and networked governance. We develop a typology of design, pragmatic, and framing power that focuses on how and in whose interests power is mobilized to achieve outcomes. We propose that the conceptual model helps to explain power dynamics across different sectors and across both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Significant research challenges arising from the analysis include the measurement and monitoring of the outcomes of power asymmetries over time. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e479. doi: 10.1002/wcc.479. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Environmental changes are increasing the need to understand complex cross-scale feedbacks in social–ecological systems. However, consistent conceptualisation of learning associated with environmental governance is lacking, and research mainly centres on individual variables. This paper identifies a typology of such learning, and theorises about configurations of variables. Focusing on experimentation as an intervention geared towards learning, it proposes a definition of policy experiment. A theoretical framework is presented, summarising a typology of experiments based on learning-related variables embedded in design choices, and reflected in institutional rule aggregations. The framework facilitates systematic analysis of real-world cases and testing of hypotheses on the effects of different types of experiment on learning. A case study demonstrates application of the framework. Results suggest future research paths that include attention to additional relevant variables. The findings have relevance for scholars interested in experimentation and learning, and environmental policy-makers considering experimentation to assess policy innovations.

Climate change adaptation governance is in flux. Adaptation policies are being adopted by governments at a rapid pace, particularly in Europe. In the period 2005-2010, the total number of recorded adaptation policy measures in the EU grew by some 635%. Despite the plethora of work on adaptation governance, few if any empirical studies have been conducted that explore the driving forces behind the rapid adoption and diffusion of adaptation policies. Working within the theoretical framework of national policy innovation (see Jordan and Huitema, 2014a,b), we draw on a uniquely systematic database of national climate polices to develop a set of hypotheses on the drivers and barriers surrounding the adoption and diffusion of climate change adaptation policies across 29 European countries. Using an internal/external model we postulate that adaptation is largely being driven by internal factors. Additionally, we look to the possible effects of this policy adoption and diffusion to see if adaptation is emerging into a new and distinct policy field. What we find is that indeed it could be in a handful of countries. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

States have been widely criticized for failing to advance the international climate regime. Many observers now believe that a "new" climate governance is emerging through transnational and/or local forms of action that will eventually plug the resulting governance gaps. Yet states, which remain oddly absent from most discussions of the "new" governance, will remain key players as governance becomes more polycentric. This paper introduces a special issue that explores the ability of states to rise to these interconnected challenges through the analytical prism of policy innovation. It reveals that policy innovation is much more multi-dimensional than is often thought; it encompasses three vital activities: invention (centering on the 'source' of new policy elements), diffusion (that produces different 'patterns' of policy adoption), and the evaluation of the 'effects' that such innovations create in reality. The papers, which range from qualitative case studies to large 'n' quantitative studies, offer new insights into the varied roles that states play in relation to all three.They show, for instance that: the policy activity of states has risen dramatically in the past decade; that state innovation is affected to similar degrees by internal and external factors; and that policies that offer flexibility to target groups on how to meet policy goals are most effective but that voluntary reporting requirements are ineffective. This paper draws upon these and many other insights to offer a much more nuanced reflection on the future of climate governance; one that deservedly puts states at the front and center of analysis. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

© 2019 The Authors Failure to address unsustainable global change is often attributed to failures in conventional environmental governance. Polycentric environmental governance—the popular alternative—involves many centres of authority interacting coherently for a common governance goal. Yet, longitudinal analysis reveals many polycentric systems are struggling to cope with the growing impacts, pace, and scope of social and environmental change. Analytic shortcomings are also beginning to appear, particularly in the treatment of power. Here we draw together diverse social science perspectives and research into a variety of cases to show how different types of power shape rule setting, issue construction, and policy implementation in polycentric governance. We delineate an important and emerging research agenda for polycentric environmental governance, integrating diverse types of power into analytical and practical models.

A survey of German public officials responsible for municipal flood management along the Rhine has been carried out to assess their perceptions of flood risk and protective behaviour. A sociopsychological framework based on expectancy-valence models was used to develop an overview of potentially important factors in prompting action to avoid flood damage. The applied framework was confirmed as a useful tool to get more insight into the riskreducing processes in the public-sector sphere. The study delivers valuable guidance on those factors, which should be given more attention in order to improve the level of preparedness and to reduce flood losses.

The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governingclimate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local andregional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, includingthe potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.