Coastal Sustainability and Institutional Resilience: How Countries Respond to Harmful Algal Blooms

Coastal communities that depend on marine resources face both chronic and acute threats from harmful algal blooms (HABs), requiring effective institutional responses. Resilience provides a useful framework for assessing how communities monitor, respond to, and adapt to these hazards and how institutions shape those capacities. Historically, communities have developed institutions to mitigate such risks, making institutional resilience a valuable analytical lens. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to examine institutional measures for preventing and mitigating HABs in coastal waters. It analyzes resilience-building measures in four democracies with distinct institutional configurations: the United States, Australia, Norway, and Japan. By distinguishing between ex ante (proactive) and ex post (reactive) measures and comparing responses to temporally similar HAB events, the analysis identifies institutions as key factors shaping risk assessment, monitoring adoption, and policy effectiveness. Evaluating HAB governance through a resilience lens provides a practical basis for planners and decision-makers to develop more balanced response portfolios. The findings suggest that sustained investment in proactive as well as reactive measures is key to strengthening long-term adaptive capacity in addressing HAB risks. Note: A list of abbreviations is provided before the References Section.