The necessity of pragmatic muddling. Ten Swedish early adopter cities navigating climate adaptation policy-implementation in the urban built environment

Abstract

While climate adaptation planning and implementation is gradually increasing across the globe, there is a documented gap between what is done and what needs to be done. Researchers have documented climate adaptation efforts at the strategic policy-making level and in urban planning practices, but less is known about how cities navigate the intricacies of climate adaptation policy-progression in the existing built environment. Contributing to the analytical unpacking of how to reduce policy implementation gaps, this paper targets ten Swedish early adopter cities seeking to proactively and pragmatically progress with their climate adaptation efforts from policy-formation to implementation in the urban built environment. Qualitative analyses of interviews and policy-documents illustrate that the cities, despite their early adopter status, struggle with stepwise policy-progression and get stuck when approaching implementation. Ensuring appropriate climate adaptation in the existing urban built environment becomes problematic due to current legal distribution of responsibilities, diverse land-ownership patterns and path-dependent structures and configurations within cities that are dense, intricate and tightly developed over of time. We identify three pragmatic action-strategies adopted to create solution space and allowing the cities to proceed: event-driven, target-driven and opportunity-driven climate adaptation, each having their advantages and disadvantages for ensuring urban robustness, as well as different requirements for up-scaling. The analysis enables important lessons of climate adaptation policy-progression, the promise and pitfalls of stepwise adaptation and the necessity of pragmatic muddling that is required to make climate adaptation work in the existing urban built environment.