Institutional capacity-building for targeting sea-level rise in the climate adaptation of Swedish coastal zone management. Lessons from Coastby

For coastal areas across the world, sea-level rise and problems of coastal erosion and coastal flooding are expected to increase over the next hundred years. At the same time political pressure for continued waterfront planning and development of coastal areas threatens to increase our societal vulnerability, and necessitating climate adaptation in coastal zone management. The institutional dimension has been identified as important for ensuring a more robust adaptation to both current climate variability and future climate change. In this paper, lessons regarding institutional constraints for climate adaptation are drawn from a Swedish case-study on local coastal zone management, illustrating the diverse and complex nature of institutional capacity-building. The aim of the paper is to illustrate critical factors that from an institutional perspective condition the capacity to achieve a more integrated, strategic and proactive climate adaptation and for turning “rules on paper” to working practice, based on case-study experiences from Coastby. Following and expanding a framework for analysing institutional capacity-building we learnt that a selective few key actors had played a critical role in building a strong external networking capacity with a flip-side in terms of a weak internal coordinating capacity and lack of mutual ownership of coastal erosion between sectoral units e.g. risk-management, planning and environment. We also found a weak vertical administrative interplay and lack of formal coherent policy, procedures and regulations for managing coastal erosion between local, regional and national administrations. Further, tensions and trade-offs between policy-agendas, values and political priorities posed a barrier for capacity-building in coastal zone management which calls for processes to mediate conflicting priorities in policy-making, planning and decision-making. The case-study suggests that the ability of the political administrative system to acknowledge and deal with institutional conflicts is a critical condition for ensuring an integrated and proactive climate adaptation in coastal zone management.

Research highlights
► We illustrate institutional conditions for climate adaptation of Swedish coastal zone management.
► There is an implementation gap where rules on paper does not easily translate into coastal zone management practice.
► Strong singular actors may have a flip-side in the form of a weak internal coordination.
► Individuals may have a greater impact on the extent of internal coordination than administrative cultures or traditions.
► The political administrative system does not openly deal with conflicting priorities in coastal zone planning and decision-making.