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Abstract:
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"Climate change is a global issue with highly localized impacts. In the face of national inaction subnational government have taken the lead on climate change policy. While effective mitigation efforts requires large-scale national coordination, some subnational governments have begun to enact adaptation policies to address climate risks within their jurisdictions and to coordinate across jurisdictions. Understanding how cooperation occurs across jurisdictional boundaries is one of the key challenges to designing effective climate policies. Using a national dataset on subnational government climate policy activities, this paper examines what influences whether a subnational government agency has enacted a climate adaptation action. It initially focuses on characteristics of subnational jurisdiction themselves that facilitate or hinder local action. This includes population density, political party vote share, exposure to risk from sea level rise, and intensity of state-level climate planning effort. The model then examines the influence of participation within either a formal or informal climate policy network and the scale of the political jurisdictions that network partners operate. Using a classic definition of political jurisdictions within a federal system this includes partners whose activities are focused on the local urban scale, county, state and national. The final model examines patterns of cross jurisdictional cooperation and whether a network includes members who are explicitly engaged in county-to-county cooperation within or across state boundaries and network partners who are organized to facilitate interstate cooperation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the nature of polycentric governance in climate adaptation policy and the importance of the results for understanding inter-jurisdictional cooperation on climate issues."
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