Planning for Climate Change: Is Greater Public Participation the Key to Success? (original) (raw)
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Public participation and adaptation to climate change
Public participation is commonly advocated in policy responses to climate change. Here we discuss prospects for inclusive approaches to adaptation, drawing particularly on studies of long-term coastal management in the UK and elsewhere. We affirm that public participation is an important normative goal in formulating response to climate change risks, but argue that its practice must be sensitive to existing critiques of participatory processes from other contexts. Involving a wide range of stakeholders in decisionmaking presents fundamental challenges for climate policy, many of which are embedded in relations of power. In the case of anticipatory response to climate change, these challenges become magnified because of the long-term and uncertain nature of the problem. Without due consideration of these issues, a tension between principles of public participation and anticipatory adaptation is likely to emerge and may result in an overly-managed form of inclusion that is unlikely to satisfy either participatory or instrumental goals. Alternative, more narrowly instrumental approaches to participation are more likely to succeed in this context, as long as the scope and limitations of public involvement are made explicit from the outset.
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Communities that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change need to adapt to increase their resilience. Effective government policies and plans are a key component of this transition, but they are not sufficient in themselves. The community needs to be made aware of the risks, acquire knowledge about the options that are available for a response, and be empowered to take their own actions. Effective public engagement is therefore key to success in planning for climate change. This paper focuses on the importance of public engagement in climate change adaptation policy. It undertakes a systematic quantitative review of the literature dealing with the core themes of climate change awareness, knowledge, and engagement in policy-making. The findings reveal a gap in the existing academic literature on public engagement, its impacts on different types of knowledge, and the integration of both into climate change adaptation policy. In addition, findings show a strong link between publ...
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This article explores the space for public participation during the consenting process for a nationally significant wind energy or carbon capture and storage infrastructure project. Legal obligations to provide opportunities for public involvement in these processes can be found in national, EU and international law. However, an examination of strategic planning policy suggests that in practice, very little will be up for discussion at this stage. This is consistent with a certain mistrust of the public in high-level policy discourse on the technological change thought necessary for climate change mitigation. Legally entrenched rights to participate, coupled with limited opportunities to influence, create the danger that participation becomes a simple bureaucratic hurdle, frustrating for all concerned.
Governments at varying levels have invested funds in climate modelling, impact, risk and vulnerability assessments, and proactive planning for future climate conditions. Local governments have been very active in this space, as climate change adaptation is recognised to be particularly context specific. In Australia, many local governments have developed either stand-alone climate change adaptation plans, or incorporated significant adaptation goals and actions in other organisational strategies. However, are these strategies and actions contributing to 'successful' adaptation – a somewhat slippery concept? Monitoring and evaluation can contribute to our knowledge of whether actions are effective, and for whom, in which context. There are many barriers and challenges to monitoring and evaluating climate change adaptation, but decades of evaluation theory and practice can help address these challenges. A recent survey of Australian local governments, however, suggests that not all plans are being actively and systematically monitored, and evaluations are often internal reviews, rather than rigorous evaluations. This presentation will provide the preliminary findings of a national survey of local governments' adaptation monitoring and evaluation efforts, and how they may contribute to our understanding of whether we are 'adapting successfully'.
Developing Effective Governance Responses To Climate Change: The Case Of Australia
The Asian Conference on Social Sciences Osaka Japan 2013 ISSN: 2186-2303, 2013
prepare action plans to counter its impacts. The imperative to act as quickly as possible is an added strain on governments, which seek effective and timely responses to this complex problem. Yet the multiplicity of actors, particularly at the local level, and interests at stake cause complications to formulate and implement effective policies to mitigate or adapt to climate change. In order to alleviate such complexity, adaptive governance could be a solution for environmental issues. Yet it is still experimental and prone to failure in larger scale policy implementations. This research examined Australia in terms of both the climate policy-making complexities and a test ground for adaptive governance. Despite in recent years creating a specialized Department of Climate Change, formulizing the National Climate Adaptation Framework, initiating its Local Adaptation Pathways Programme and passing a controversial carbon tax, one cannot speak of a coherent (sustainable and /or effective) national response to climate change in Australia. Firstly, complexities created by the plurality of climate change actors in Australia exacerbate seemingly irreconcilable differences in perspective. Secondly, the structural, procedural and contextual limitations of Australian institutional governance structures complicate the implementation of effective adaptive governance for climate change response plans. Australia as an example shows that without building a sufficient consensus between different climate change actors about the need to act, without awareness of the structural and procedural deficiencies of local governance, and the importance of building up a flexibility of understanding among the local and national actors for policy making, it is very difficult to develop a comprehensive, effective, and sustainable climate change policy. Many solutions could be offered to ease this complexity and utilize a better functioning adaptive governance at the national level but this research argues that one solution could also be building up a filter (council or committee) that would operate between the local and national/federal levels of governance. It would act as a system of checks and balances and be responsible for what is included and excluded from policies and who is responsible and accountable for their implementation. Such an idea could help the local and national/federal levels of government to have a better understanding of cooperative policy making and its bureaucratic implementation.
Complex policy issues such as climate change adaptation can be interpreted in many different ways, resulting in different assumptions about their purpose and goals. Using material from a qualitative study in the Australian local government sector, this research shows that stakeholders involved in local adaptation policy formulation often do not have a shared view about the meaning and purposes of adaptation, although such shared understanding is commonly assumed in adaptation processes. Drawing on the frame research literature and current conceptualisations of climate change adaptation, we argue that subconscious frame divergence can present a major challenge for effective organisational-level adaptation. Conversely, making frames and framing processes explicit is a first step towards clarifying adaptation goals and generating shared ownership of adaptation processes. While frames have been shown to be intrinsically subjective, we discuss three dominant frames that emerged from the study: avoiding disasters, community resilience, and averting organisational risk. We evaluate these in light of their theoretical origin and recent application 2 towards climate change adaptation. Our research suggest that the 'averting organisational risks' frame is by far the most commonly activated frame. Individuals working in the community services sector frequently referred to the 'community resilience' frame, while the 'avoiding disasters frame' was used in public and policy discourse to circumvent the arguments of those sceptical about the existence and causes of climate change. We suggest that by incorporating frame reflexivity into existing adaptation planning processes, a more diverse range of policy options can be explored, delivering more effective adaptation policies.