Climate Adaptation at the Local Scale: Using Federal Climate Adaptation Policy Regimes to Enhance Climate Services

This paper is an interpretive reanalysis of 17 in-depth case studies of community-based climate adaptation sponsored by the Kresge Foundation between 2014–2016. Drawing from the political science and international relations literature, we use the policy regime construct to characterize U.S. federal policies and programs that drive and enable climate adaptation at the local scale. While the regime construct has been used to evaluate the international governance of climate change mitigation, it has not been used in the context of climate adaptation. We find that numerous federal policies are used by localities to pursue adaptation objectives. We find that local adaptation initiatives based on federal policy tend to be non-prescriptive, are situational in their application, utilize common policy tools, and adopt a de-centered mode of governance. While a truly sustainable and resilient society may entail fundamental “transformation”, we suggest that such a paradigm shift might be constructively cultivated through the blueprint laid out in the 17 case studies examined here—using existing know-how and tools. Based on our analysis and characterization of a federal climate adaption policy regime, we propose that the enterprise of climate services may need to move beyond existing models of co-production to embrace an ‘apprenticeship’ model, immersing technical information providers in the milieu of policy and governance in order that they might learn to recognize factors that influence the applicability, usefulness, and uptake of climate products and services.