While research focusing on how boundary organizations influence the use of climate information has expanded substantially in the past few decades, there has been relatively less attention to how these organizations innovate and adapt to different environments and users. This paper investigates how one boundary organization, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center (GLISA), has adapted by creating “boundary chains” to diversify its client base while minimizing transaction costs, increasing scientific knowledge usability, and better meeting client climate information needs. In this approach, boundary organizations connect like links in a chain and together these links span the range between the production of knowledge and its use. Three main chain configurations are identified. In the key chain approach, GLISA has partnered with other organizations in a number of separate projects simultaneously, diversifying its client base without sacrificing customization. In the linked chain approach, GLISA is one of several linked boundary organizations that successively deepen the level of customization to meet particular users’ needs. Finally, by partnering with multiple organizations and stakeholder groups in both configurations, GLISA may be laying the groundwork for enhancing their partners’ own capacity to make climate-related decisions through a networked chain approach that facilitates cooperation among organizations and groups. Each of these approaches represents an adaptive strategy that both enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of participating boundary organizations’ work and improves the provision of climate information that meets users’ needs.
Public policies increasingly address complex problems such as climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation that require forging connections across existing areas of policy activity. Despite the emerging prominence of these types of policymaking challenges, more research is needed to understand policy responses to them. In this paper, I use survey responses from 287 cities and a hurdle model to comparatively examine the factors that underlie the adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation as issues influencing city policymaking and their extension across areas of city policymaking. I find evidence that while social change, crisis, and conditions supporting nascent coalitions were associated with adoption, extension across areas of policymaking was associated with the city?s prevailing political economy as well as the resources for expanding communities of interest. In the process, I offer empirical evidence for existing similarities and differences in cities? considerations about climate change mitigation and adaptation; particularly that the number of policymaking areas influenced by mitigation was associated with financial factors while the number influenced by adaptation was associated with socioeconomic ones.
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