Disentangling municipal capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation

Abstract

Transformative adaptation is described as decisive to mitigating risks and to seizing opportunities from a changing climate, requiring new ways of governing, planning and collaborating, alongside technical innovations. Building municipal capacities for citizen participation in adaptation is important to enabling such transformational changes but remains challenging. By applying capacities distilled from the literature on Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance in a Swedish municipal case, this study aims to disentangle key limits for, and innovations to strengthen, local capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation. Interviews with municipal officials, focus groups with citizens, and document analyses were employed to analyse how climate adaptation and citizen participation are governed, and how these policy areas are interacting and could be bridged. The study points at conditions that foremost prevent bridging established policies and practices on adaptation and citizen participation, stemming from the different logics and distribution of responsibility within, and lacking collaboration between, these separated policy areas. The analysis concludes that potential ways to enable citizen participation in adaptation involve: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups for participation; co‐designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyse and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.

The role of citizens in sustainability and climate change governance: Taking stock and looking ahead

“…Such societal transformation must be informed by studies on issues pertaining to representation, equity and responsibility and should address the tensions associated with these issues (Kiss et al, 2022). Local governments especially struggle with questions of when and how to involve citizens, and what this implies for the division of responsibilities (Glaas et al, 2022; Hofstad et al, 2022; Uittenbroek et al, 2022)—a finding that corroborates the conclusions of recent studies on the positive and negative social effects of urban governance and co‐production processes if they are not conducted adequately (e.g., Anguelovski et al, 2019; Chambers et al, 2022; Wamsler, Alkan‐Olsson, et al, 2020).…”

“…Importantly, the contributions to this special issue employed various analytical foci and units of analysis, including individual persons (Mees, 2022), different legal systems and institutional settings (Akerboom & Kundis Craig, 2022), specific practices of divisions of responsibility (Snel et al, 2022), the perspectives of civil servants (Uittenbroek et al, 2022) and diverse types of engagement, participation and co‐creation (Glaas et al, 2022; Hofstad et al, 2022; Kiss et al, 2022). The findings yielded by employing these diverse foci are highly complementary, underlining the value of involving a wide range of scholarly disciplines, fields and contexts in the study of citizen engagement, including public administration, environmental psychology, environmental sociology, legal studies and sustainability science, in addition to environmental policy and governance.…”

“…Citizen engagement entails a range of processes and mechanisms initiated sometimes by citizens and sometimes by public authorities. Each of the seven papers in this special issue unpacks different elements of what citizen engagement can mean and entail: citizen‐led initiatives (Mees, 2022); citizen participation in government‐initiated adaptation projects (Glaas et al, 2022); assuming responsibilities in climate adaptation that were hitherto a purview of governmental actors (Uittenbroek et al, 2022); becoming active agents of change in co‐creation processes (Hofstad et al, 2022); assuming responsibility for the governance of certain hazards (Snel et al, 2022); contributing to environmental decision‐making processes (Akerboom & Kundis Craig, 2022); contesting government‐led initiatives, or being a source of critical reflection on dominant mitigation and adaptation approaches (Kiss et al, 2022).…”

“…The second theme of our special issue involves the systematic analysis and evaluation of different types of interactions between citizens and various institutions and the associated societal, political and legal factors that condition opportunities for collaborative governance . Examples are enquiries into how law structures public participation (Akerboom & Kundis Craig, 2022); and how institutional settings and existing societal practices can enable or constrain certain interactions and engagement (Glaas et al, 2022; Hofstad et al, 2022; Kiss et al, 2022; Uittenbroek et al, 2022).…”

“…In their paper, Glaas et al (2022) study how local government capacity for citizen participation to support transformative climate adaptation can be understood and mobilised, focusing on how established policies interact and could be bridged. Norrköping in Sweden is the empirical case for analysis.…”