Climate change potentially brings continuous and unpredictable changes in weather patterns. Consequently, it calls for institutions that promote the adaptive capacity of society and allow society to modify its institutions at a rate commensurate with the rate of environmental change. Institutions, traditionally conservative and reactive, will now have to support social actors to proactively respond through planned processes and deliberate steps, but also through cherishing and encouraging spontaneous and autonomous change, as well as allowing for institutional redesign. This paper addresses the question: How can the inherent characteristics of institutions to stimulate the capacity of society to adapt to climate change from local through to national level be assessed? On the basis of a literature review and several brainstorm sessions, this paper presents six dimensions: Variety, learning capacity, room for autonomous change, leadership, availability of resources and fair governance. These dimensions and their 22 criteria form the Adaptive Capacity Wheel. This wheel can help academics and social actors to assess if institutions stimulate the adaptive capacity of society to respond to climate change; and to focus on whether and how institutions need to be redesigned. This paper also briefly demonstrates the application of this Adaptive Capacity Wheel to different institutions.

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Review of recent literature on adaptation to climate change and general literature on policy processes shows that there are a large number of barriers that hamper the development and implementation of climate change adaptation strategies. To reduce and manage the number of barriers and combine both streams of literature, we propose seven clusters of barriers to adaptation. Little is known, however, about the relative importance of these barriers to climate change adaptation policies and practices. An online survey was conducted between March 2010 and July 2010 among 264 scientists, policymakers, and private actors from different sectors and levels who are involved in climate change adaptation projects and programmes in the Netherlands. The survey aimed to gather their experiences with, and perceptions of, the barriers identified in the literature and encountered in their daily work. Both climate-related and non-climate-related barriers were included in the survey. Data were subjected to both qualitative and quantitative analysis. A survey feedback workshop was organized to discuss the results with several of the survey respondents. Results of this study revealed that respondents considered conflicting timescales as the most important cluster of barriers to adaptation. Other highly ranked barriers include conflicting interests; lack of financial resources; unclear division of tasks and responsibilities; uncertain societal costs and future benefits; and fragmentation within and between scales of governance. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrated that scales matter in understanding the barriers to adaptation: actors from lowlevels of governance seem to consider the barriers as more severe than actors from high levels of governance.

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