Project

Adapt LOCK-IN - Understanding the impact of policy lock-ins on climate change adaptation

Adapt LOCK-IN delves into the challenges of embedding climate adaptation into policies. Focusing on six domains like biodiversity and coastal risks, it addresses "wicked problems" exacerbated by climate change. Through mixed methods, including interviews and document analysis, the study explores policy lock-in dynamics, their origins, and potential dissolution. By examining cases in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, the research seeks to identify strategies for countering lock-ins and promoting effective climate change adaptation across various contexts.

Introduction

Preparing for and coping with the accelerating impacts of climate change requires adaptation in a wide range of policy areas. Yet, despite increasing calls for action, policy change to allow this is often slow. A range of counteracting forces and barriers can make it difficult to embed adaptation objectives into important policies and move them away from ‘business-as-usual’. However, deeper dynamics are also at play, where self-reinforcing mechanisms, feedback and path dependencies interact across different spatio-temporal scales and coalesce to establish policy lock-ins.

Description

The project examines policy lock-in dynamics in six problem domains, specifically biodiversity, coastal risks, extreme weather event impacts on mental health, forestry, heatwave impacts on human health, and water scarcity.

Each of these represent a specific risk or issue that will be exacerbated by future climate change. These are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’, characterised by complexity (non-linearity, multi-scale dynamics and problem interconnectivity) and significant uncertainty, which create dilemmas for decision-makers. There is a growing consensus that addressing problems of this nature will require significant transformations of governance arrangements, policy systems and practices, which are likely to transcend established policy domains and sectors, involve multiple centres of decision-making and a broader range of actors.

This project uses mixed methods to examine how lock-in dynamics are created, maintained and shaped over time. Our research draws from in-depth document analysis, interviews and workshops with selected policymakers and practitioners working at different scales.

Using an analytical technique called process tracing, we identify the origins of lock-in dynamics and interactions between feedback mechanisms as well as contextual factors, which can impede change, sustain the status quo or make it difficult to diversify policy responses to climate change adaptation. Equally, the research examines how lock-in dynamics have been or are being dissolved and ‘unlocked’ to support adaptation, to help identify specific strategies for counteracting the potentially problematic effects of policy lock-ins.

Looking across case studies in Germany, the Netherlands and UK, we use Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify common and unique lock-in dynamics (and underlying conditions) affecting climate change adaptation.

Publications