Resilient and sustainable? Climate change adaptation strategies in the 100 Resilient Cities initiative over time and space

Cities are seen as key for shaping the climate future. Many cities engage in transnational municipal networks and public policy mechanisms to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change and future challenges. A currently promoted public policy mechanism in the climate change adaptation literature is transformative adaptation. Transformative adaptation in climate literature and practice seeks to merge the concepts of resilience and sustainability to prepare for uncertain futures. Experimental, participatory, and reflexive planning modes take into account specific shocks and systemic stresses of (urban) systems. In this way, transformative adaptation assumedly advances profound systemic change in coping with disruptive events instead of dwelling upon (incremental) business-as-usual strategies. Empirical evidence on urban climate change adaptation points, however, to a technocratic, top-down understanding of adjustments to specific shocks without integrating system-wide stresses. The city strategies of the transnational 100 Resilient Cities (100 RC) initiative seemed promising for boosting a transformative turn in this regard as participating cities were required to link resilience actions to their most urgent shocks and stresses. However, 100RC received critique for reinforcing a neoliberal agenda that aims to activate self-help in vulnerable populations, shifting the security responsibility from the government to the citizen. Political science scholars frequently believe that in general, the resilience concept pays insufficient attention to justice and equity, and, thus, reproduces unequal or unjust systems and structures as an apolitical paradigm. Against this background, we ask: Do RC strategies live up to the notion of transformative adaptation envisioning resilient and sustainable urban futures? Which notions of adaptation shape urban resilience planning over time and geographical location? And, are more transformative resilience strategies linked to more comprehensive sustainable adaptation practices in urban spaces? We examine 30 of the published 74 RC strategies from the timeline of first-, second-, and third-generation cities that balances geographic representation from the Global South and North. First, we develop a three-tier coding scheme that assesses (1) the perception of crisis and vulnerabilities, i.e. main perceived shocks and stresses for the city, (2) local participation in this assessment and respective planning, as well as (3) the strategic planning employed, which includes planning coherence, content, and mode in the envisioned approach within the resilience strategy. With this coding scheme, we aim to reflect transformative adaptation through the procedural policy approach a city engages with. Second, we assess whether more transformative resilience strategies are linked to more sustainable adaptation practices in urban spaces by examining the coverage of and balance between social, economic, and environmental Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addressed in resilience strategies. Third, we perform a cluster analysis to trace whether the identified notions of adaptation vary or persist over time and/or geographical location. First results show that not only climate-related shocks but also social stresses, such as housing scarcity, are frequently considered. The main planning mode follows strategic partnerships with businesses to challenge such stresses, which reiterates the criticism of a neoliberal or apolitical understanding and implementation of resilience.