Governing Sea Level Rise in a Polycentric System: Easier Said than Done (Organizational Response to Climate Change: Businesses, Governments) - Hardcover

Vantaggiato, Francesca Pia; Lubell, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009475940 ISBN 13: 9781009475945

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Synopsis

How do polycentric governance systems respond to new collective action problems? This Element tackles this question by studying the governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Like climate mitigation, climate adaptation has public good characteristics and therefore poses collective action problems of coordination and cooperation. The Element brings together the literature on adaptation planning with the Ecology of Games framework, a theory of polycentricity combining rational choice institutionalism with social network theory, to investigate how policy actors address the collective action problems of climate adaptation: the key barriers to coordination they perceive, the collaborative relationships they form, and their assessment of the quality of the cooperation process in the policy forums they attend. Using both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, the Element finds that polycentric governance systems can address coordination problems by fostering the emergence of leaders who reduce transaction and information costs. Polycentric systems, however, struggle to address issues of inequality and redistribution.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009475940
• ISBN 13: 9781009475945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 106