Coordinated planning effort as multilevel climate governance: Insights from coastal resilience and climate adaptation

Abstract

Using flood risks and potential impacts of sea level change within the U.S. Great Lakes region over the past 20 years, we explore the association between coordinated planning effort as a form of multilevel climate governance and community resilience attributes under climate risk. Content analysis and coastal adaptation principles allowed us to evaluate coordinated planning effort at county and state levels to derive a horizontal or vertical coordination index which was then used to evaluate if synergies generated among plans were correlated with climate risk mitigation and enhanced adaptation to climate change. Further, we incorporated evaluation results of varied community resilience characteristics and coordinated planning effort metrics in the context of climate change. Empirical results suggest that the extent of coordinated planning effort at the county and state levels is closely associated with coastal community resilience and climate change adaptation.