Adaptive and anticipatory governance in urban adaptation to climate change

The starting point of this chapter is the view that urban adaptation to climate change, as a determined effort to reduce future vulnerability and possible climate change risks, presents an outstanding opportunity for sustainable long-term visionary urban planning. Vulnerability reduction often means reducing people’s enhanced exposure and improving people’s adaptive capacity, which, in its core, means developing cities for citizens’ well-being, prosperity, institutional stability, and social security. In practice, we see that urban adaptation and urban planning are often departmentalised, resulting in uncoordinated efforts and resource allocation conflicts. Overall approach to urban planning, including adaptation, is often deterministic and functionalist, i.e., disregarding changing socio-economic conditions and high uncertainty. This chapter explores the complementarity of adaptive and anticipatory governance principles in urban adaptation to climate change, focusing on dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and fragmentation. Specifically, it focuses on institutional dynamics, learning processes and linking urban planning and adaptation to socio-economic development.