Global adaptation governance: how intergovernmental organizations mainstream climate change adaptation

Climate change adaptation is increasingly being mainstreamed into all types of organizations across the world. A large number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the European Union, the World Bank, or Food and Agriculture Organization, have already started to mainstream adaptation. Yet, despite a surge in scholarly interest in climate policy integration over the past decade, adaptation is still predominantly studied as a local issue and mainstreaming in IGOs remains poorly understood. In this article, we develop and test an innovative framework for examining adaptation mainstreaming practices in IGOs. Using quantitative and qualitative data derived from extensive fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020, we examine mainstreaming practices in a large number of IGOs and arrive at two key findings. First, adaptation has been mainstreamed within the procedures and outputs of IGOs across ten (nonclimate) issue areas, while there is also evidence of important issue-specific variation. Second, there is variation across mainstreaming practices in the sense that discursive mainstreaming is most common, whereas more concrete collaboration, policy change affecting projects and programs, and budget allocations are less common. We conclude with a discussion of how our framework can inform the theory and practice of global adaptation governance.KEY POLICY INSIGHTS IGOs have mainstreamed adaptation into a large array of issue areas, yet scholarly and practical debates remain siloed.Mainstreaming adaptation has advanced most in IGOs in the areas of food and development and least in the domain of migration and security.Discursive mainstreaming is more common than other types of adaptation mainstreaming in IGOs, regardless of the issue area.Global governance is a distinct setting in which powerful states, institutional complexity, and funding constraints strongly affect IGO practices to successfully mainstream adaptation.