Department Environmental Social Sciences

Climate change adaptation strategies in Switzerland

© Kecko 2013

This project addresses the research question on how local climate change adaptation strategies are designed and may evolve. We strongly focus on the impact of extreme events on the design and policy formulation of adaptation measures. Climate change adaptation becomes nowadays particularly crucial for the resource water, mainly in relation with the principles outlined in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) addressing the challenge of coordinating the use of, and the protection of and from the resource water. The protection from the resource water directly links to flood events and natural disasters that may be impacted by global climate change. Furthermore, the integration of actors in different policy sectors, political entities and decision-making levels can be seen as a way how to improve the adaptive capacity within the water sector. Thus, integrated water resources management constitutes one major challenge of current and future generations when it comes to find sustainable responses to climate change impacts. We therefore analyze adaptation to climate change in the case of flood risk management, and compare various actors’ preferences for measures and measure mixes with the current implemented measures as a contribution to IWRM.

Project team

Prof. Dr. Karin Ingold Group leader, Cluster: PEGO Tel. +41 58 765 5676 Send Mail

External team members

Anik Glaus (Institute of Political Science, Universität Bern)

Prof. em. Dr. Gunter Stephan (Department of Economics, Universität Bern)

Prof. Dr. Rolf Weingartner (Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, Universität Bern)

Prof. Dr. Philippe Thalmann (Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, Universität Bern)

Publications

Under what conditions does an extreme event deploy its focal power? Toward collaborative governance in Swiss flood risk management

In this chapter we study the longer-term response of a national government to natural disasters. We are interested in when and how collaborative governance arrangements spark new national flood prevention policies. Our understanding of collaborative governance not only includes public and private actors that are involved in a complex network (see Nohrstedt 2015) but also the larger institutional setting as well as regulations in the domain of flood risk management. In other words, we conceive the full range from politics and polity to policies when defining collaborative risk management (see also Driessen et al. 2012). For national flood prevention this concretely means that decision making and implementation processes are designed multilevel and cross-sectoral, that competences and responsibilities are shared between different jurisdictions and policy subsystems, and that policies and regulations reflect this horizontal and vertical integration of actors and institutions (Ingold et al. 2018; Ingold 2017). [...]
Ingold, K.; Gavilano, A. (2020) Under what conditions does an extreme event deploy its focal power? Toward collaborative governance in Swiss flood risk management, In: Bynander, F.; Nohrstedt, D. (Eds.), Collaborative crisis management. Inter-organizational approaches to extreme events, 132-147, doi:10.4324/9780429244308-11, Institutional Repository

How to create and preserve social capital in climate adaptation policies: a network approach

The processes and impacts of climate change require adaptation through what can be described as horizontal and vertical structures of actors' integration. In climate adaptation and natural resource management literature, this structural component is often related to social capital, which is defined in various ways but usually refers to a public good that is built and fostered within a network of social relations. While hypotheses about social capital in networks are well studied in network literature, here, I argue that they should be reflected and tested in the particular context of climate change adaptation policy. I ask: how do communities affected by climate change and the broad range of actors involved in the design of climate adaptation policies build social relationships? And, how do they manage to maintain those relations over time?
To answer these questions, climate adaptation policies in six Swiss mountain regions are investigated via social network analysis. Hypotheses about the creation and preservation of weak versus strong ties under the particular setting of Swiss federalism and climate-affected local communities are tested. Results confirm that the creation of weak ties, such as one-way information transfer, can lead to the establishment of mutual collaboration relations over time. Such mutual and reciprocal relations can then more easily be activated by local communities to produce both short-term responses and long-term solutions to climate change impacts.
Ingold, K. (2017) How to create and preserve social capital in climate adaptation policies: a network approach, Ecological Economics, 131, 414-424, doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.08.033, Institutional Repository

In the Eye of the Beholder: network location and sustainability perception in flood prevention

The aim of this paper is to investigate how sustainability perceptions are emergent properties of collaborative networks in flood governance in Switzerland. In recent decades, the impact of global warming and multiple stresses on water regimes has influenced the design of new approaches to flood risk management, especially in Western Europe. The use of non-structural measures such as planning tools and watershed campaigns indicates a change from technocratic to more integrated flood governance perspectives. Flood governance is increasingly influenced by the principle of sustainability, understood as stronger horizontal integration of its social, economic and environmental dimensions. The paper examines the integration of sustainability in the design of flood prevention and policies, suggesting that integration relates to participating actors’ perceptions of sustainability and that these perceptions are reflected in network structures. Focusing on four regional case studies, we use survey data and social network analysis to investigate how actors relate to each other and how they rank sustainability indicators. Results show that sustainability perceptions differ strongly across cases, and tend to be more balanced (assigning equal importance to environmental, economic and social indicators) within and sometimes even across actor types and sectors. We find that while actors in central network positions tend to have more balanced sustainability perceptions, context- and project-specific factors impact sustainability perceptions even more.
Balsiger, J.; Ingold, K. (2016) In the Eye of the Beholder: network location and sustainability perception in flood prevention, Environmental Policy and Governance, 26(4), 242-256, doi:10.1002/eet.1715, Institutional Repository

How involved are they really? A comparative network analysis of the institutional drivers of local actor inclusion

Different socio-economic and environmental drivers lead local communities in mountain regions to adapt land use practices and engage in protection policies. The political system also has to develop new approaches to adapt to those drivers. Local actors are the target group of those policy approaches, and the question arises of if and how much those actors are consulted or even integrated into the design of local land use and protection policies. This article addresses this question by comparing seven different case studies in Swiss mountain regions. Through a formal social network analysis, the inclusion of local actors in collaborative policy networks is investigated and compared to the involvement of other stakeholders representing the next higher sub-national or national decisional levels. Results show that there is a significant difference (1) in how local actors are embedded compared to other stakeholders; and (2) between top-down versus bottom-up designed policy processes.
Ingold, K. (2014) How involved are they really? A comparative network analysis of the institutional drivers of local actor inclusion, Land Use Policy, 39, 376-387, doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2014.01.013, Institutional Repository

Metz, F.; Glaus, A. (2019). Integrated Water Resources Management and Policy Integration: Lessons from 169 Years of Flood Policies in Switzerland. Water, 11(6), 1173. DOI: 10.3390/w11061173.

Ingold, K.; Zimmermann, W. (2011) How and why forest managers adapt to socio-economic changes: a case study analysis in Swiss forest enterprises. Forest Policy and Economics 13: 97-103. DOI:10.1016/j.forpol.2010.06.003.

Ingold, K.; Balsiger, J.; Hirschi, C. (2010) Climate change in Mountain Regions: How local communities adapt to extreme events. Local Environment 15(7), 651-661. DOI:10.1080/13549839.2010.498811.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Karin Ingold Group leader, Cluster: PEGO Tel. +41 58 765 5676 Send Mail

Information

Project Start: September 2014 – Juli 2020

Funding: Sinergia SNF, OCCR, IPW