Lock-Ins in Climate Adaptation Governance

After more than a decade of implementation efforts in various fields of adaptation to climate change, a growing number of scholars have expressed their concern about an apparent lack of effect on current policy and practice. In short, while the call has been for ‘societal transformation’ (O’Brien, 2011; Termeer et al., 2017), what we are observing is more akin to inaction or at best incrementalist ‘muddling through’ (Tschakert & Dietrich, 2010). Despite an almost unanimous consensus over the need – in principle – for policies to promote climate adaptation, observers identify a widening mismatch between the scientific evidence and the adaptation needs identified by academics on the one hand and, on the other hand, uninformed, ignorant, or wilful persistence of conventional practices, with increasingly vulnerable communities, infrastructures, and agriculture as a result. Even where climate adaptation has entered public debates, and related strategies and policies are being developed, they are often surprisingly un-innovative and incremental in nature. Indeed, even in regions that show relatively high levels of adaptive capacity, which means that in principle they could adapt well, the dominant approach is to postpone action, and to ‘wait and see’ – often referring to persistent uncertainties (see Huitema et al., 2016). Against this background, a lively debate has emerged about barriers to climate adaptation (Biesbroek et al., 2013, 2014; Eisenack et al., 2014; Moser & Ekstrom, 2010) and path dependencies (Wise et al., 2014). This has identified an impressive, indeed ‘seemingly endless’ number of barriers and challenges in adaptation planning and implementation (Biesbroek et al., 2013). However, the academic literature on adaptation governance barriers remains largely descriptive, ahistorical, and lacking in conceptual clarity. Little effort has been made to develop indicators that can identify and distinguish barriers from non-barriers, identify and prioritise their importance and severity, understand their history or evolution, or more systematically