Making adaptation work: unlocking governance inertia for accelerated climate-proofing of the urban built environment

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, according to the UN climate panel, the EU and the Swedish national expert council for climate adaptation. Accelerated adaptation is therefore required for our societies to meet the challenges imposed by climate change.

Cities are both highly vulnerable and important arenas for mobilizing climate action.

For Swedish cities, climate-proofing the existing built environment has been identified as a key bottleneck due to current legal distribution of responsibilities and land-ownership patterns, lack of appropriate public-private collaboration and co-funding mechanisms. To move forward, new innovative solutions are required.

Following this, the proposed project explores how public-private climate governance experiments contribute to unlocking inertia in the built environment.

Case-studies based on interviews and project-documentation form our empirical basis to analyze how experiments are set up and progressing in terms of process and output, determinants and how bottlenecks are reconfigured. We also identify policy-lessons in co-creation with policy-actors. The project results in four journal articles and three policy-relevant deliverables.

By this we intend to make an imprint on both research on urban climate governance experimentation and on the practical endeavours to climate-proof the urban built environment.