Abstract
International policy development and expected climate change impacts such as flooding, landslides, and the extinction of sensitive species have forced countries around the Baltic Sea to begin working on national climate adaptation policies. Simultaneously, the EU is building both a central and a macro-regional Baltic Sea-wide adaptation strategy to support national policy developments. However, it yet remains unclear how these EU strategies will complement each other or national policies. This article analyzes the constraints and opportunities presented by this new institutional interplay and discusses the potential of the forthcoming EU strategies to support national policy. It does so by mapping how adaptation is institutionalized in two case countries, Sweden and Finland, and is organized in the two EU approaches. The vertical institutional interplay between scales is analyzed in terms of three factors: competence, capacity, and compatibility. Results indicate institutional constraints related to: risks of policy complexity for sub-national actors, an unclear relationship between the two EU approaches, an overly general approach to targeting contextualized climate change vulnerabilities, and a general lack of strategies to steer adaptation. However, there are also opportunities linked to an anticipated increased commitment to the national management of adaptation, especially related to biodiversity issues.
Highlights
Assessments of climate variability in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) over the last fifty years have indicated trends towards higher sea water temperatures, decreasing ice cover, and increased precipitation in an already sensitive ecosystem [1]
Betsill and Bulkeley [25] argue that climate adaptation management may become fragmented when the “institutional makeup” at lower governmental levels is not compatible with the direction identified in the overarching strategies
Though the Baltic Sea approach still lacks a precise direction and the central approach is broader in scope, both approaches touch on shared climate change vulnerabilities and partly target the same member states
Summary
Assessments of climate variability in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) over the last fifty years have indicated trends towards higher sea water temperatures, decreasing ice cover, and increased precipitation in an already sensitive ecosystem [1]. These similarities make it possible to analyze the importance of national institutionalization of climate adaptation as a parameter for building a functional European institutional interplay, without including other determinants in the analysis.
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