Municipal authorities' climate change adaptation plans: Barriers to the inclusion of intensified needs of vulnerable populations

Abstract

Climate Adaptation Plans (CAPs) usually include a section on urban resilience, in which policymakers are expected to address human needs created or exacerbated by climate-related emergency events. However, the urban resilience sections of CAPs tend to remain under-developed, with welfare-related risks often overlooked. Until recently, there has been limited acknowledgement of the barriers preventing the positioning of human need at the core of CAPs. To conceptualize and understand the impact of such barriers, this study used an agenda-setting approach. We examined the incorporation of vulnerable populations' needs into CAPs drawn up by municipal authorities in Israel, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a prompt for the assessment of barriers to agenda setting and lessons learned. Drawing on twenty interviews with senior administrators in Israeli municipal authorities, we identified three administrative barriers hindering the integration of vulnerable populations' intensified needs into CAPs. The barriers were created by disparities between confidence in their succeesful emergency management and their knowledge of unmet needs; between acceptance of responsibility and access to training, resources or impact; and between local initiatives and reliance on national funds. Overlooking administrative barriers is bound to leave scholarly understanding of the slow pace at which CAPs translate lessons learned from human crises into policy, limited or lacking.