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Opening up the black box of adaptation decision-making

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 493–494 (2015)Cite this article

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To the Editor —

Although the recent Perspective by Eisenack et. al.1 attempts to move the discussion on barriers to climate change adaptation forwards, in our view it still does not address a key challenge that has hampered this line of research since its beginnings. In 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC stated that adaptation efforts will encounter — and hence need to overcome — different types of limits, constraints or barriers2. Since then, the scientific community has busily identified and catalogued all manner of different barriers, and discussed various means of overcoming them. While offering an important first step in exploring adaptation, the tendency to abide by top-down and functionalist views of decision-making and barriers is both problematic conceptually and unsupportable empirically if the ambition is to explain adaptation decision-making.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Administration and Policy Group, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6700 EW, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Robbert Biesbroek

  2. IDHEAP, Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, CH-1015, Quartier Mouline, Switzerland

    Johann Dupuis

  3. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK

    Andrew Jordan

  4. Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, 49931, Michigan, USA

    Adam Wellstead

  5. Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, V5A 1S6, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Howlett

  6. Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 469C Bukit Timah Road, 259772, Singapore

    Michael Howlett

  7. Department of History and Politics, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK

    Paul Cairney

  8. Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, 101 Diefenbaker Place, Saskatoon, S7N 5B8, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Jeremy Rayner

  9. Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, University of Alberta, 515 General Services Building, Edmonton, T6G-2H1, Alberta, Canada

    Debra Davidson

Authors
  1. Robbert Biesbroek
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  2. Johann Dupuis
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  3. Andrew Jordan
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  4. Adam Wellstead
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  5. Michael Howlett
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  6. Paul Cairney
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  7. Jeremy Rayner
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  8. Debra Davidson
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Correspondence to Robbert Biesbroek.

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Biesbroek, R., Dupuis, J., Jordan, A. et al. Opening up the black box of adaptation decision-making. Nature Clim Change 5, 493–494 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2615

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