Institutional Responses to Transformative Stressors: Confronting the Climate Adaptation Imperative through Metro-Regional Planning

Abstract

Manifestations of climate change are already creating significant stress in many parts of the world. On-going increases in greenhouse gas emissions are tracking the upper level scenario forecasts proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This indicates a high probability that climate change stress will intensify over the coming decades. Consequently, responding through climate adaptation must become a central tenet of successful urban governance and management. Climate change adaptation is defined as an imperative in this thesis. The institutionalisation of climate adaptation is identified as a key institutional challenge for urban and metropolitan planning. Institutionalisation refers to climate adaptation becoming established, codified and implemented as a central tenet of planning governance. This thesis develops conceptual understandings of climate adaptation as an institutional imperative. It identifies the intersection of this problem with planning and examines how planning regimes, as institutions, can better manage climate change stresses impacts in human settlements. Institutional transformation is identified as central to this process. Planning regimes must transform in order to institutionalise new rules of governance, which are designed to better respond to climate change stress through climate adaptation. A new conceptualisation of institutional transformation is presented in this thesis, focused on a new typology of stressors, referred to as ‘transformative stressors’. This is based on an argument that institutional scholarship does not adequately articulate the idea that certain stressors can create such severe stresses that institutional transformation must follow, or the institutions charged with responding risk failing or becoming redundant. A transformative stressor is characterised as a chronic, large-scale phenomenon, which triggers a process of institutional transformation, whereby institutions seek to re-orientate their activities in order to better respond to the social, economic and environmental impacts created by the transformative dynamic. Climate change is characterised as a transformative stressor within the institutional context of urban and regional planning. Institutional transformation, leading to climate adaptation becoming established as a central element of planning governance, is identified as a necessary response to the social, economic and environmental stress associated with of climate change.