The climate adaptation literature tends to mention leadership as one of many factors that may enhance the resilience and adaptability of social-ecological systems. This paper aims to better understand the leadership factor by focusing on how innovative practices of climate change adaptation can be seen to perform leadership functions within regional governance networks, enhancing their adaptive capacity. It first presents a framework that was inspired by complexity leadership theory combined with other modern families of leadership concepts, distinguishing five functions of leadership within regional climate adaptation networks: the political-administrative, adaptive, enabling, dissemination and connective functions. Second, we present the case of ‘climate adapation agents’, a newly emerged governance innovation as part of a government-funded project seeking to enhance adaptation to climate variability in the region of Northern Hesse, Germany. The theoretical framework is then applied to the case, the central question being which leadership functions have been fulfilled within the regional adaptation network and if and how the temporally appointed adaptation agents have contributed to these functions. Our data consists of interviews with scientists and regional authority employees involved in the project, secondary analyses and a preliminary project evaluation report.
