Suchergebnisse

AbstractClimate change impacts are most severe in developing countries with limited adaptive capacity. Accordingly, in Africa, climate change adaptation has become an issue of international funding and practice. As suggested in the Introduction to this special issue, administrative traditions could play a role in how adaptation plays out. This, however, raises questions about how foreign funding regimes coincide with recipients' administrative traditions, especially on the African continent where administrative traditions are often meagerly established. To address these questions, this article takes an explorative approach. From a literature review of African state governance and development aid approaches, we take colonial legacy as the most distinctive factor responsible for African administrative traditions. In addition, we define three ways in which foreign aid programs have dealt with African administration: (1) aligning with donor administration, (2) blueprinting administration, and (3) ignoring administration. Using 34 African countries' National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs), we analyze how African governments actually frame adaptation as a governance challenge. We contrast these frames with: (1) administrative traditions based on colonial legacy and (2) the ways in which development aid programs have historically dealt with recipient African administrations. Our findings indicate that NAPAs only meagerly refer to the administrative tradition that could be expected based on colonial legacy, but extensively refer to blueprint ideas common among international donors, or ignore administration altogether. We discuss the implications for adaptation to climate change.

AbstractAlthough governments are developing and implementing policies to adapt to the impacts of climate change, it remains unclear which factors shape how states are developing these policies. This paper aims to assess whether or not administrative traditions matter for the formation of national climate change adaptation policy in 32 high‐income countries. We operationalize administrative traditions based on five structural criteria: vertical dispersion of authority, horizontal coordination, interest mediation between state‐society, role of public administrator, and how ideas enter bureaucracy. We construct a unique adaptation policy dataset that includes 32 high‐income countries to test seven hypotheses. Our results indicate that countries' adaptation policies align to some extent with their administrative structure, particularly dispersion of authority and horizontal coordination. However, we find limited evidence that other public bureaucracy factors are related to national adaptation policy. We conclude that administrative traditions matter, but that their influence should not be overestimated.