Planning and Perceptions: Exploring Municipal Officials’ Views on Residents’ Climate Preparedness

In Sweden, municipalities and municipal planning are central to the government’s preparedness for climate-related risks, as municipalities are the organizations that will largely have to adapt to and prepare for climate change. However, there is little government guidance in the form of clearly formulated policies, policy objectives, and detailed regulations to support municipalities in this work. In practice, municipal officials are tasked with developing climate preparedness, including facilitating citizen awareness of the need to prepare for climate-related risks. By exploring the local level of Swedish public administration, which in practice has to deal with different and sometimes divergent understandings of a situation and who should manage it, the paper explores the implications of officials’ meaning-making about local risk governance. An exploratory approach to risk governance and meaning-making rationality is used to examine Swedish municipal officials’ views of citizens’ climate crisis preparedness and the motives and barriers they perceive the citizens to have in developing this preparedness. An interview study is conducted with 23 officials in 5 municipalities. Based on the results, the paper discusses the implications of the perception that citizens have no constructive role to play in the work to better prepare municipalities for climate change. The paper concludes by discussing how officials’ meaning-making rationality needs to be addressed in the development of robust climate preparedness.