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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ABSTRACT. This special feature aims to further our understanding of the way in which transitions occur in water management. We contend that if we want to understand such transitions, we need to understand policy change and its opposite, policy stability. These issues have attracted considerable academic attention. Our interest is, however, very specific and thereby unique: we review the role that (groups of) individuals play in the process of preparing, instigating, and implementing policy change. In this article, a review of the literature on policy change provides the basis from which we extract a set of strategies which are available to policy entrepreneurs. The questions for the rest of this special feature are first, can we detect the influence of policy entrepreneurs in actual cases of major policy change, and second, which strategies have they actually used to affect policy change?

The advocacy coalition, multiple streams, punctuated equilibrium, and epistemic communities frameworks all point to relevant processes conditioning policy stability and policy change. In this paper it is argued that these frameworks are partly overlapping, partly producing rival hypotheses, but most of all they offer complementary explanations for long-term policy development. In a case study of Dutch coastal flooding policy 1945-2003 we illustrate how a stable 'safety coalition', closely tied to an epistemic community of civil engineers, sustained a policy monopoly established by the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. This coalition was responsible for the construction of the Delta Works, a programme of coastal engineering works aimed at the enclosure of most estuaries in the south-western part of the Netherlands. It is also shown how an environmentalist coalition, supported by fishermen and a newly developing eco logical epistemic community, has been able to bring about major policy change by fashioning a new policy image, and exploiting a window of opportunity created by a shift of national government. KEYWORDS Advocacy coalition; coastal flooding; epistemic community; policy change; policy image; window of opportunity.

This paper discusses sixteen instances of radical water policy change across the globe. The key question we seek to answer is about the role of individuals in such transitions. 'We call these individuals 'policy entrepreneurs' and we suggest that they can affect transitions through a set of strategies, such as idea development, coalition building, the detection and exploitation of v^^indows of opportunity, network management, and venue shopping. Our empirical analysis shows that individuals do contribute to transitions. They do so in collectives, dividing tasks over various members. The way in which they manage to affect transitions depends, at least partly, on the institutional setting they operate in. Some national policy systems offer better opportunities for centralized direction (and thus top-down pattern of transitions) whilst other systems offer better chances for bottom-up change. In either case, change has to be prepared for before windows of opportunity open. One way to prepare change is to instigate pilot projects, showing the feasibility of other approaches to water management. Policy change is a political game: networks must he built, issues need to be framed strategically, forums manipulated or hy-passed, and strategies adjusted to the peculiarities of the institutional system the entrepreneur is working in.