Influencing resilience: the role of policy entrepreneurs in mainstreaming climate adaptation.

Thomas Tanner,Sunil Acharya,Elizabeth Gogoi,Aditya Bahadur,Rizwan Uz Zaman

doi:10.1111/disa.12338

Abstract

One way to make development pathways more resilient in the face of a changing climate has been through mainstreaming adaptation into government policies, planning and sectoral decision‐making. To date, many of the transferable lessons have taken the form of technical approaches such as risk assessments and toolkits. This article instead draws on evidence from South Asia to emphasise some of the more tacit and informal approaches used to influence adaptation policy. Despite their apparent significance in policy processes, such tactics are often neither planned for nor well reported in resilience‐building projects and programme documents. Using evidence to populate a typology of influencing strategies, this article looks particularly at the role of policy entrepreneurs who navigate the political complexity of both formal and informal governance systems to promote successful adaptation mainstreaming. It concludes with recommendations for adaptation and resilience programming that can more effectively harness the breadth of influencing strategies.

Highlights

There is growing awareness of the need for government policy and planning to enhance resilience by adapting to the changing climate, fuelled by international events such as the 2015 Paris Climate Summit and periodic media interest following climate-related disaster events
Despite the arguments in favour of mainstreaming, in many cases adaptation has been implemented as a more discrete set of projects and programmes. This reflects the project-oriented nature of both international funding models and many government departments leading on climate change in the Global South, and by the widespread desire to learn how climate adaptation and building resilience is different from business-as-usual development (Yamin, 2005)
The programme carried out an assessment of community-level risks in the district, which was released by the district administration. This helped highlight the human dimension of climate change and attract media and political attention

Summary

Introduction

There is growing awareness of the need for government policy and planning to enhance resilience by adapting to the changing climate, fuelled by international events such as the 2015 Paris Climate Summit and periodic media interest following climate-related disaster events. Despite the arguments in favour of mainstreaming, in many cases adaptation has been implemented as a more discrete set of projects and programmes This reflects the project-oriented nature of both international funding models and many government departments leading on climate change in the Global South, and by the widespread desire to learn how climate adaptation and building resilience is different from business-as-usual development (Yamin, 2005). The strategies for policy influence in externally financed adaptation mainstreaming programmes reflect this tendency, and are commonly formalised into technical steps (OECD, 2009; UNDP and UNEP, 2011) These follow activities to deliver a set of prescribed outputs or outcomes, such as developing new policies, implementing new activities or demonstrating changes in decision-making processes. These risks can all be managed to some extent by additional adaptation actions

Developing adaptation policy narratives

Building rapport and trust

Advocacy and networking to mainstream adaptation

Downstream implementers