Scholars on the governance of adaptation to climate change often propose diversification, flexibility, learning, and the involvement of both private and public partners to make societies more resilient. This suggests that there are uniform conditions or templates to increase resilience and achieve effective adaptation. However, governance of adaptation does not take place in a societal or political void. In this paper we will emphasize that conditions differ from state to state.
Successful adaptation depends, at least to a great extent, on the prevailing conceptions of the public interest and the normative principles underpinning public policies and planning in society; these conceptions largely determine the legitimacy, effectiveness and resilience of adaptation measures.Moreover, the (new) modes of governance of adaptation may affect traditionally existing conceptions of the public interest in societies. Therefore, adaptation to climate change efforts provide an interesting laboratory for assessing shifts in public interest.
In order to describe and analyse both existing and future normative principles and conceptions we apply a categorization of public interest from Alexander in “The Public interest in Planning: From Legitimation to Substantive Plan Evaluation” (2002) in cases of adaptation measures in the Netherlands. With the help of Alexander, we discuss an apparent shift from predominantly public government responsibilities, based upon collective, unitary (‘solidarity’) -conceptions of the public interest, towards a mix of public and private governance connected to more utilitarian or more rights –based (deontic) conceptions of public interest .
As a result of our analysis of Dutch governance of adaptation we expect to make clear that scholars should take into account the different ways of resilience that societies have (sometimes implicitly) already developed over decades, and uncover the strengths and weaknesses of the normative principles underlying the planning and policy processes relevant for climate change.
