Does public policy support or undermine climate change adaptation? Exploring policy interplay across different scales of governance

Urwin, Kate and Jordan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7678-1024 (2008) Does public policy support or undermine climate change adaptation? Exploring policy interplay across different scales of governance. Global Environmental Change, 18 (1). pp. 180-191.

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Abstract

Policy makers have now recognised the need to integrate thinking about climate change into all areas of public policy making. However, the discussion of 'climate policy integration' has tended to focus on mitigation decisions mostly taken at international and national levels. Clearly, there is also a more locally focused adaptation dimension to climate policy integration, which has not been adequately explored by academics or policy makers. Drawing on a case study of the UK, this paper adopts both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective to explore how far different sub-elements of policies within the agriculture, nature conservation and water sectors support or undermine potential adaptive responses. The top-down approach, which assumes that policies set explicit aims and objectives that are directly translated into action on the ground, combines a content analysis of policy documents with interviews with policy makers. The bottom-up approach recognises the importance of other actors in shaping policy implementation and involves interviews with actors in organisations within the three sectors. This paper reveals that neither approach offers a complete picture of the potentially enabling or constraining effects of different policies on future adaptive planning, but together they offer new perspectives on climate policy integration. These findings inform a discussion on how to implement climate policy integration, including auditing existing policies and 'climate proofing' new ones so they support rather than hinder adaptive planning.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/climate_action
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups: University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Depositing User: Rosie Cullington
Date Deposited: 26 Feb 2011 12:03
Last Modified: 15 Jun 2023 18:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/24871
DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.08.002

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