Project
High ambitions, (s)low implementation? The politics of tracking adaptation to climate change (NWO-VIDI)
Adapting to the impacts of climate change is necessary and increasingly urgent. Governments have formulated ambitious goals, but how do we know if they actually deliver on the promises? How do we know if and when additional measures are needed? Monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation actions is important to answer these questions but hardly takes place in practice. In thisproject, the key political mechanisms that hamper the process of designing and executing evaluation are analysed, and politically sensitive interventions are developed to break through these challenges.
Background
Adapting to the impacts of climate change is necessary and increasingly urgent. Governments across the globe have increasingly formulated high adaptation ambitions to become climate resilient. In order to understand if these ambitions are implemented in practice, tracking progress on adaptation is of critical importance. Tracking adaptation not only informs whether ambitions have been achieved, but is important to enhance accountability, exchange lessons of what works where and why, and to assess whether accelerated or transformative actions are needed. Despite growing realisation that tracking adaptation is important, the processes of designing and executing these is considered to be slow, inadequate, and inefficient. Previous research has identified conceptual, methodological and empirical reasons, but these have not resulted in accelerated actions. The starting point in this program is that the root causes are inherently political yet, the scientific literature has not unpacked this theoretically and empirically.
Description
This program aims to develop, theorise and empirically test a new scientific perspective on the politics of adaptation tracking. It aims to theorise the political causes and conditions that influences the processes through which governments design and execute adaptation tracking frameworks. Adopting a comparative approach, the program empirically unpacks the political dynamics around the Global Stocktake under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement, the 2021 EU Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, and ongoing developments in 10 countries from across the globe. Mixed methods are used, combining traditional methods of expert interviews, observations and focus group discussions, with innovative methodologies, including machine learning and quantitative text analysis to analyse the politics of adaptation tracking.
The program takes a solutions-oriented perspective by co-designing politically sensitive intervention pathways with practitioners. It provides concrete evidence-based insights where and how to intervene in policy processes in order to accelerate the design and execution of adequate and effective frameworks on adaptation tracking.