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Public Bureaucracy and Climate Change Adaptation Robbert Biesbroek Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands B. Guy Peters University of Pittsburgh Jale Tosun Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany Abstract Despite recognizing the importance of public bureaucracies in governing climate change, our knowledge of how their behavioral and structural characteristics influence climate change adaptation policy is limited. This article provides an introduction to a collection of studies that seeks to explore the link between climate change adaptation and public bureaucracies, and to distill lessons for the scholarship on adaptation as well as the persistent debates on the role of administrative traditions in public policy. The articles in the special issue demonstrate that how state and social actors are organized, the ways in which scientific advice enters bureaucracies, and uniformity in the making and implementing of policy matter for adaptation policy. We conclude that the concept of administrative traditions is still necessary for understanding the choices made by public actors, but contend that other factors such as economic motives and political willingness should be considered more critically in the literature on administrative traditions. KEY WORDS: administrative traditions; behavior; climate change adaptation; public bureaucracies; public policy

公共官僚和气候变化适应 尽管大众认可公共官僚在治理气候变化中产生的作用，但关于前者的行为特征和架构特征是如何 影响气候变化适应政策的认识还很局限。本文引入了一系列研究，这些研究试图探索气候变化适 应和公共官僚机构之间的联系。同时本文提取出相关学术经验，用于研究适应和对行政传统在公 共政策中产生的作用而进行的持续辩论。本期特刊收录的文章展示了国家行为者和社会行为者如 何进行相应组织，从而使科学建议进入官僚机构，并且让用于适应政策的政策事务在制定和实施 时达到统一。本文结论认为，行政传统这一概念对理解公共行为者做出的选择而言依然是必要 的，但结论同时主张，例如经济动机和政治意愿等其他因素应在行政传统文献中受到更具批判性 的考量。 关键词：行政传统,行为,气候变化适应,公共官僚,公共政策

Burocracia pública y adaptación al cambio climático A pesar de reconocer la importancia de las burocracias públicas al gobernar el cambio climático, es limitado nuestro conocimiento de cómo sus características estructurales y de comportamiento tienen una influencia sobre las políticas de adaptación al cambio climático. Este artículo proporciona una introducción a una colección de estudios que busca explorar el vínculo entre la adaptación al cambio climático y las burocracias públicas, y extraer lecciones para la investigación sobre la adaptación, así como para los debates persistentes sobre el papel de las tradiciones administrativas en las políticas públicas. Los artículos en el Review of Policy Research, Volume 35, Number 6 (2018) 10.1111/ropr.12316 © 2018 The Authors. Review of Policy Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Policy Studies Organization This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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número especial demuestran que la forma en que se organizan los actores estatales y sociales, las formas en que el asesoramiento científico ingresa en las burocracias y la uniformidad en la elaboración y la implementación de políticas son importantes para la política de adaptación. Llegamos a la conclusión de que el concepto de tradiciones administrativas sigue siendo necesario para comprender las decisiones tomadas por los actores públicos, pero sostenemos que otros factores, como los motivos económicos y la voluntad política, deberían considerarse de manera más crítica en la literatura sobre tradiciones administrativas. PALABRAS CLAVE: tradiciones administrativas; comportamiento; adaptación al cambio climático; burocracias públicas; políticas públicas

Introduction

Public bureaucracies inevitably play a crucial role in governing global challenges. There exists an extensive literature that sheds light on how public bureaucracies are organized, and how their organization and internal rules in turn affect their performance (Lan & Rainey, 1992; Peters, 2015, 2017; Van Dooren, Bouckaert, & Halligan, 2015). This is often captured in the concept of “administrative traditions” (Peters, 2018). Scholarship has less extensively explored the characteristics and behavior of members within public bureaucracies, even though it is plausible to expect that this exerts an impact on organizational performance. This special issue takes the literature on administrative traditions as a starting point, and strives to further it by adopting an analytical lens that concentrates on the behavior of bureaucratic actors. To coherently analyze the influence of administrative tradition, the contributions to this special issue focus on climate change adaptation. Adaptation was selected because of our interest in how public bureaucracy influences new policy issues and, in particular, policy implementation. Climate change adaptation differs from mitigation (i.e., reducing greenhouse gas emissions), both in terms of problem structure and the ways in which policies are proposed—not to mention their nature (Ford et al., 2015). Climate change mitigation is often a matter of major policy intervention, while adaptation is more likely to involve a continuing implementation of activities and the involvement of public bureaucracy. In general, adaptation is defined as all intentionally planned policy actions taken by public or private actors to reduce vulnerability of policy sectors, societal groups, or specific regions to climate change (Dupuis & Biesbroek, 2013). The corresponding literature has highlighted that, in general, public bureaucracies constitute barriers to successful adaptation. Bureaucracies are seen as creating unwanted red tape that prevents timely action, which in turn reinforces behavioral routines rather than facilitating flexible and innovative action. As a result, adaptation policies are perceived as lacking a certain willingness to experiment and innovate, and to focus on efficiency of service delivery rather than creating the redundancy that may be necessary for successfully managing severe climate change-related challenges, among other things (Biesbroek, Termeer, Klostermann, & Kabat, 2013; Eisenack et al., 2014; Oberlack, 2017). In addition to the underlying argument put forth by this research, climate change adaptation remains an emerging field of policy action. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, states are requested to formulate their intended efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to climate change impacts, increase adaptive capacity, and reduce vulnerability (Lesnikowski et al., 2017). The adoption of the Paris Agreement by the signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

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marks a shift away from previous efforts under the Kyoto Agreement that followed a more top-down, legalistic, and uniform model of global climate governance. The emergence of this more polycentric governance model, in which “pledge and review” is the new doctrine, has created new openings for non-state actors such as businesses and civil society to actively engage in climate action (Hall & Persson, 2017; Jordan et al., 2015; Kahan & Roberts, 2013; Magnan & Ribera, 2016; Woodruff & Stults, 2016). Despite changes in global discourse resulting from the Paris Agreement, there has always been—and will continue to be—a dominant role for the state when it comes to climate change adaptation. Being both the initiator of policy innovations, as well as the enabler of broader society-driven measures (Jordan & Huitema, 2014), states possess an unparalleled capacity to steer public governance and implementation in the area of adaptation. The actions of states are driven by a wide range of motivations such as increasing (economic) damage from climate impacts (European Environment Agency, 2017), pressure from the public and NGOs (Nulman, 2016), learning through transnational networks (Bauer & Steurer, 2014), and (economic) competition with other countries (Massey, Biesbroek, Huitema, & Jordan, 2014). Although adaptation is a relatively new policy issue compared to mitigation, many states have already started to take action in this area, from developing wait-and-see approaches to becoming early innovators that lead by example (Massey et al., 2014). In 2009, for instance, only eight EU member states had formulated and adopted National Adaptation Strategies (Biesbroek et al., 2010). At the end of 2017, by contrast, more than 20 countries and 4 transnational regions had developed adaptation policies. Similarly, Lesnikowski , Ford, Biesbroek, Berrang-Ford, and Heymann (2016) noted an increase of 88% in terms of adaptation policy actions, as reported by 41 UNFCCC Annex I countries between 2010 and 2015. In Europe, meanwhile, Massey and collaborators (2014) found an even higher increase in adaptation actions between 2008 and 2014 in 29 EU countries. In this context, we argue that the (limited) prevailing understanding of public bureaucracies and their respective roles in climate change adaptation has served to reduce complex, cause-effect processes down to simplified notions suggesting that public bureaucracies and their traditions are hampering progress on adaptation. As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that the question of how public bureaucracy shapes the way(s) in which adaptation decisions are made and implemented has remained within a black box (Biesbroek, Dupuis, & Wellstead, 2017; Biesbroek et al., 2015; Wellstead, Howlett, & Rayner, 2013). However, there are strong normative claims in the literature regarding how bureaucracies ought to work in order to successfully adapt to climate change. Given the growing literature on climate change adaptation, as well as increasing international attention to this topic more generally, we believe there has been a woefully inadequate consideration of public administration and its importance for addressing climate change impacts. Indeed, there are several examples of adaptation policy initiatives directly affecting—or resulting from—public bureaucracy. In many countries, there has been a mushrooming of interdepartmental working groups and committees working to develop comprehensive national adaptation plans and ensure coordination (Biesbroek et al., 2010; Lesnikowski et al., 2016). New policy tools have emerged such as the National Task Force on Climate Change Adaptation in Denmark, which serves as a mobile expert team supporting municipalities with low policy capacity to implement national

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policy and guide local adaptation action (European Environment Agency, 2014). This trend is not limited to Western bureaucracies. Highly vulnerable countries like Vietnam have also demonstrated a growing interest in climate change adaptation, investing significantly in building policy capacity within their hierarchical bureaucracies to integrate adaptation across different administrative levels (Phuong, Biesbroek, & Wals, 2018). In Bangladesh, for example, both bottom-up and top-down initiatives have emerged as a response to the vast climate-induced challenges facing the country and its citizens (Araos, Berrang-Ford, Ford, Biesbroek, & Moser, 2017; Vij, Biesbroek, Groot, & Termeer, 2018). Some of the efforts made by individual states are specifically designed to navigate the challenges facing public bureaucracies to integrate climate change adaptation policies. Indeed, the routinized decision-making processes, allocation of tasks and responsibilities, and performance orientation that characterizes most bureaucracies do not go hand-in-hand with the proclaimed need for transformative adaptation. Instead, policy systems must now address the “wicked” and even “super wicked” characteristics of climate change within their existing bureaucratic structures through incremental steps and small wins (Levin, Cashore, Bernstein, & Auld, 2012; Termeer, Dewulf, & Biesbroek, 2017; Walker, Rahman, & Cave, 2001). There are various examples where civil servants have experimented with new types of governance arrangements to manage these challenges. The Delta Commissioner and Delta Fund in the Netherlands, for example, are placed outside of traditional public institutions and political influences to ensure a durable and long-term implementation of adaptation policy even in times of political turmoil and crisis (Boezeman, Vink, & Leroy, 2013). Although there is ample evidence that progress is being made on adaptation worldwide, fundamental questions remain regarding the determinants of how states adapt and which role public bureaucracies play in that process. That public governance is crucial for adaptation is evidenced by Berrang-Ford and colleagues (2014), who assess 117 countries and show that “good governance”—e.g., accountability, stability, and human rights—and “GDP per capita” are relevant factors that determine whether or not countries are developing dedicated climate change adaptation policies and strategies. However, it is clear that there are fundamental political-institutional differences among administrative systems, even in times of globalization, digitalization, New Public Management, and other trends (Painter & Peters, 2010). Despite ongoing administrative changes, some of the “DNA” of the administrative system remains in place and is helping to shape patterns of implementation and policy advice regarding how states and societies are adapting to climate change. For example, Vink et al. (2015) show how neo-corporatist traditions in the Netherlands and pluralist ones in the United Kingdom shape the different ways in which adaptation responsibilities are divided between public and private realms, the types of policy instrument mixes being proposed, which sectors are to be involved and in what way, and how adaptation policy is being implemented. In particular, the Dutch neo-corporatist arrangements have led to policy mainstreaming but only a small degree of learning, while the negotiations required within the British system have produced more effective policy learning. Other studies have examined how tasks and responsibilities are distributed and implemented within federal systems (Glicksman & Levy, 2010), and whether such systems create opportunities for adaptation not present in unitary states. The fragmentation and ambiguity created in federal systems, for example, was found to negatively

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influence mitigation but to positively shape adaptation, as they created bottom-up initiatives and self-organization (Steurer & Clar, 2018). Central to this special issue, therefore, is the question of how—and if—administrative traditions and their bureaucracies influence climate change adaptation policy making and implementation by (non)state actors. This is not only an interesting question for adaptation scholarship, but also for that on public administration more broadly (Javelin, 2014; Pollitt, 2015). Our aim is to elaborate and reflect on some of the assumptions regarding how administrative practices become routine, and how these routines can still be altered in the context of managing the “wicked” issue of climate change. While the study of climate change adaptation policy is important in and of itself, it can also serve as one example of the ways in which governments have to cope with significant scientific and technical issues—as well as with policy problems that carry the risk of becoming full-blown crises. By linking administrative traditions with adaptation policy, we therefore provide an example of this concept’s utility in addressing both a specific type of public policy, and with public policy more generally. We present the ideas guiding the special issue in the remainder of this article, outlining what we understand to be administrative traditions and how they shape adaptation policy by examining the micro- and macro-level effects of administrative traditions on climate change adaptation policy. The contributions to this special issue are then introduced in their own right, followed by an outlook for possible future research in this area.

Why Administrative Traditions Matter: Behavioral Implications The first—and perhaps most fundamental—question concerning the link between public bureaucracy and climate change adaptation policy is whether individuals within public administration affect policy making and implementation. Individual decision-makers have their own preferences and function with some degree of latitude, but their behavior is also influenced to a significant extent by the organizational milieu within which they are embedded and operate (see Egeberg, 2012). While these insights are not new, there is a need to specify how decisions concerning climate change adaptation are made, and how they are actually—or potentially—affected by individuals. This is important in order to understand what types of interventions are needed, and what the effects of certain policy and administrative choices are or will be. In general, bureaucrats and civil servants are widely regarded as those responsible for day-to-day implementation of policies formulated by policy makers, and as behaving according to commands, formal and informal rules, and norms defined by elected officials (Olsen, 2006). It is crucial then that bureaucrats develop routines for collecting and processing information, and for addressing tasks, in as efficient and effective a manner as possible. These in turn result in heuristics or “logics” that provide shortcuts in decision-making that work well in particular cases. Administrative traditions tend to function as heuristics by creating standardized behavioral patterns, which become locked in overtime and guide decision-making in specific situations. Routines need not be the outcome of reflected procedures followed by bureaucrats. Howlett (2014) suggests an alternative perspective, one that departs from the assumption that information processing in government—including both elected

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officials and bureaucrats—occurs according to an established scheme. Information regarding a given policy problem is not only evaluated against solutions for the issue in question, but also factors in what various actions would entail in terms of political costs and benefits. According to Hood (2010), the political evaluation of information and available alternatives leads to risk-aversive behavior, along with attempts to avoid responsibility for the adverse consequences of future actions. This results in the adoption of standardized responses, despite the availability of an ever-growing body of knowledge. Climate change—related issues are particularly affected by these behavioral patterns, whether based on risk acceptance or aversion. Many such routine responses exist. One example concerns how bureaucrats design and implement flood risk—related policies, which differ between the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. This is due to variations in the structural and cultural dimensions of administrative traditions in each country, and their respective approaches to “risk-based governance” (Rothstein, Borraz, & Huber, 2013; Vink et al., 2015). These routine decision-making systems have worked quite well in addressing uncertain but predictable issues. However, for problems marked by (unusually high) rates of uncertainty and time pressures—as in the case of those related to climate change risks—we expect bureaucrats to abandon routine decision-making and to instead consider novel or “innovative” responses. Tensions naturally emerge when bureaucrats do not pursue this latter route, and endeavor to solve complex and unstructured issues using existing routines that are rooted in—and have emerged from—linear and structured problem-solving. In this vein, the contributions to this special issue address, in various ways, the manner in which public bureaucracies confront the tensions between innovation and routine approaches. This is a common problem for bureaucracies, but it is especially relevant for those coping with complex and rapidly changing policy issues such as climate change adaptation.

Administrative Traditions: Structural Implications The indirect yet pervasive impact of administrative traditions on the behavior of public bureaucracy actors is analogous to arguments in historical institutionalism concerning path dependence (Peters, Jordan, & Tosun, 2017; Pierson, 2000; Streeck & Thelen, 2005). By “administrative tradition,” we refer to a historically based set of values, structures, and relationships with other institutions that defines the nature of appropriate public administration. This concept is an attempt to bring together a number of characteristics of administrative systems, and to demonstrate how these elements fit together to create more or less coherent institutions (Peters, 2018). The argument here is that once institutions are created, patterns of behavior persist for a long period following the initial creation (Greener, 2005). The assumed consequence is that individuals must then internalize values in their own decision-making. Clearly, the literature on comparative public administration has used various concepts to theorize the structured ways in which states are organized and function. In this context, the notion of administrative traditions (see Painter & Peters, 2010; Peters, 2018) is linked—but simultaneously different—from certain related macro-level theories. We could have used, for example, the influence of inherited patterns of policy making

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and administration as “policy styles” (Howlett & Tosun, 2018; Richardson, 1982, 2017, 2018). These policy style conceptions tend to capture some of the same government characteristics as administrative traditions, but they are more diffused and do not focus on the role of public bureaucracy—as we endeavor to do in this special issue. When considering the vast literature on administrative traditions (e.g., Freeman, 1985; Howlett, 2003; Knill, 2001; Painter & Peters, 2010; Peters, 2018; Dyson, 2010; 6, 2004), we can deconstruct it as having multiple dimensions (see Table 1). We argue here that—for Western Europe, North America, and the Antipodes—there are four underlying administrative families: Anglo-American, Germanic, Napoleonic, and Scandinavian. There are also important hybrid cases, such as the Netherlands and Finland. Other countries around the world can be categorized as Latin American, Post-Colonial South Asian and African, East Asian, Soviet, and Islamic (Drechsler, 2013; Painter & Peters, 2010). In this special issue, we concentrate on four dimensions of administrative traditions (see Table 1). The first concerns the dichotomy between an emphasis on law and management among public bureaucrats. Do public servants conceive of themselves primarily as strict interpreters of the law, or do they see themselves more as managers responsible for translating policy goals into action? In general, AngloAmerican administrators tend to exhibit more managerial approaches, while those in Continental European states have more legalistic conceptions of their respective roles; Scandinavian administrators, meanwhile, fall somewhere between the two. We hypothesize that the more legalistic conception of administrative roles constitutes a greater barrier to new adaptation measures than does the more managerial conception. That said, public managers may become so concerned with management and efficiency that they fail to consider broader changes in policy. In addition, the relationship may reverse itself when adaptation measures have been adopted. In this context, the legalistic conception of administrative roles seems more likely than its managerial counterpart to encourage civil servants to address adaptation more systematically throughout their respective bureaucracies. The degree of linkages between the state and social actors is a second dimension of particular importance for understanding the role of public administration in making and implementing climate change policies. On the one hand, an autonomous bureaucratic agency may be able to make decisions that would be difficult to reach if it were linked with social and market actors. On the other hand, those linkages with actors outside the state can be useful for acquiring information, for innovation, and for legitimating government actions. For this dimension, some of the classic distinctions between pluralist and corporatist forms of interest intermediation become relevant Table 1. Dimensions of Administrative Traditions Dimensions of Administrative Traditions

Guiding Questions

Law vs. management

How do civil servants perceive their role? Do they think of themselves as lawyers or as managers?

State and social actors

What are the linkages between interest groups and government? Are they characterized by corporatist or pluralist values?

Uniformity

How important is uniformity of policies and administration? What mechanisms are used to create uniformity?

Scientific advice

How does scientific advice enter government consideration? How are science—policy boundaries organized?

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for understanding the ways in which the given bureaucracy functions. The long history of corporatism and corporate pluralism in the Scandinavian—and to some extent Germanic—countries provides the bureaucracy in those regions with close linkages to society and with the capacity to co-opt social actors when making difficult policy decisions, such as those involved in climate change policy (Fischer & Leifeld, 2015). The link between state and social actors may be the most important one for molding the styles of public administration and policy making into effective practices. If the individuals and organizations in public administration are accustomed to working closely with social actors through corporatist or network structures, and if those interactions are considered legitimate, then they will be more capable of implementing adaptation through more flexible mechanisms. Likewise, systems that tend to keep social actors at an arm’s length from the bureaucracy will find hierarchical styles of policy making and implementation more congenial. The third dimension of particular relevance concerns the emphasis on uniformity in the making and implementing of policy. Some administrative systems are comfortable with experimentation, and with different forms of administration in different parts of a country. Perhaps rather obviously that style of governing is more conducive to policy innovation and to variable forms of implementation than is an administrative tradition that emphasizes uniformity and higher levels of central control over implementation—see for example the work of Elinor Ostrom (2010) on polycentricism in the public sector. Finland, for instance, has a long-standing tradition of policy experimentation, such as with basic income and environmental taxes reforms in 2015 (Kivimaa, Hildén, Huitema, Jordan, & Newig, 2017; Maor, Tosun, & Jordan, 2017; Mickwitz, Hildén, Seppälä, & Melanen, 2011). It is also the first country to develop a comprehensive National Adaptation Strategy (Biesbroek et al., 2010). The capacity and willingness to experiment can expedite adaptation without threatening basic values or structures in the public sector. Various forms of innovation can exist, and these may require different styles of implementation. Some types of policy innovation for climate change adaptation may require strict top-down enforcement, with “tamper proof” legal instruments. Others may require “soft law” (see Mörth, 2004)—with higher levels of bargaining and negotiation among social actors (market or non-market). The adaptivity and openness of the legal system may also be important for understanding how innovations can be developed and implemented (Fisher, 2013). We might expect common law systems with less codified legal systems to be more capable of adaptation than more codified systems, for example (Damaska, 1986). The ability to construct law readily though judicial action and interpretation would, in this context, appear to contribute more to innovation and adaptation. This is especially true given that these systems tend to enforce legal accountability ex post rather than ex ante, permitting administrators to act first and have the legality and efficacy of their actions assessed later. On the other hand, administrative traditions that require strict legal compliance—with codified legal systems and less interaction with social actors—have the potential to perform better. Of course, this assumption depends on others relating to enforcement and compliance, with some literature suggesting that, ceteris paribus, negotiated solutions produce higher levels of compliance. As has already been noted, the legalism inherent in the Napoleonic and Germanic traditions presents, somewhat contradictory implications

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for policy innovation. On the one hand, the formality and legalism of these administrative traditions may limit the capacity to develop and implement new policies within the bureaucracy. On the other, once a policy is adopted and fully legitimated, this style of administration may be very effective in ensuring full implementation. Similarly, the decentralized and federal structures common in Germanic and Anglo-American systems (with the exception of the United Kingdom) appear to provide a greater opportunity for innovation than in unitary regimes (Glicksman & Levy, 2010); as Justice Brandeis noted regarding American federalism, “the states are the laboratory of democracy.” Given that the knowledge base and suitability of different policy instruments for climate change policy—and indeed most policies—are contested along several dimensions, the capacity to innovate with lower costs and less institutionalization may be beneficial to addressing these issues successfully. The fourth dimension concerns how (scientific) advice is organized, included, and considered in the design and implementation of policy innovations. Public bureaucracy remains an important source of policy advice for decision-makers, despite the increase in politically appointed advisors (see Eymeri-Douzanes, Boiy, & Mouton, 2015) and the role of think tanks in policy making. Beyond the scientific information possessed by the bureaucracy itself, different public bureaucracies are better structured to receive and process advice from external sources. For example, the existence of royal commissions or other information-seeking structures in certain countries enables the collection and processing of information more readily than does a conventional hierarchical structure. This dimension is of particular relevance in the context of uncertain and “wicked problems”—as in the case of climate change adaptation—which are epistemologically distant from mere policy making (EsbjörnHargens, 2010; Levin et al., 2012).

Overview of Contributions The nature of an administrative system has a real and abiding influence on the capacity of governments to make and implement policies. These connections are often complex, and this special issue can only begin to outline the connections between administration and climate change adaptation policies. We have hypothesized the various ways in which administrative traditions—at both macro and micro levels— influence adaptation policy making. Even this rather cursory examination of linkages reveals their importance, however, providing a foundation for the more detailed empirical work contained in the articles of this special issue. These contributions provide a balanced overview, with some placing (greater) emphasis on the role of individuals and their behavior and others on that of structures and rules (see Table 2). Table 2. Overview of the Contributions to the Special Issue Dimensions of Administrative Traditions

Contributions of the Special Issue

Law vs. management

Biesbroek et al.; van Buuren et al.

State and social actors

Biesbroek et al.; Klein and Juhola; Vink and Schouten; van Buuren et al.

Uniformity

Rahman and Tosun

Scientific advice

Biesbroek et al.; Schmidt et al.

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Using a comparative approach, Biesbroek, Lesnikowski, Ford, Berrang-Ford, and Vink (2018) test hypotheses concerning whether five of the eight dimensions of administrative traditions matter in terms of how 32 high-income states adopt and implement climate change adaptation policies. Making use of countries’ National Communications reported to the UNFCCC, the authsors found a limited degree of influence—and little evidence—to convincingly argue that administrative traditions matter; it is more likely, they argue, that dimensions are the confounding factors visà-vis other political–institutional aspects. According to the authors, the strongest evidence in this area relates to the dispersion of authority and horizontal coordination. van Buuren, Lawrence, Potter, and Warner (2018) also draw on a comparative approach to analyze how administrative traditions in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands shape the uptake of adaptive flood management—a novel approach to this challenge, which allows for more flexibility in design and implementation. Their results demonstrate that administrative traditions hamper the introduction of new principles and approaches, and that there is a need to align those introduced with administrative traditions in order to prevent institutional misfits. One of the critical dimensions for adaptation is the question of how (scientific) knowledge concerning climate change enters public bureaucracies. Schmidt, Teschner, and Negev (2018) conduct an in-depth analysis regarding the position of Chief Scientist in Israel, a role that serves as a “boundary spanner” across both horizontal and vertical scales and between the realms of science, policy, and society. The authors find that, even in systems where climate impacts are already felt and where scientific advice has been institutionalized through bureaucracy, there are significant barriers that still need to be addressed in order for progress on adaptation to be achieved. Concentrating on Bangladesh as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Rahman and Tosun (2018) examine what the bureaucratic regime for the implementation and management of climate adaptation projects looks like, and which types of bureaucrats are appointed to direct such projects. Paralleling state bureaucracy in general, the special bureaucracy in place for managing adaptation projects is both extensive and complex. The management of adaptation projects is also similar to general public management patterns, where generalist administrators dominate the implementation process. However, projects with a higher degree of international funding have a greater likelihood of being headed by technical/specialized administrators. The importance of international funding in this context indicates a possibility for affecting the performance of public bureaucracies. Vink and Schouten (2018), meanwhile, ask if international donor influence and reporting requirements under the UNFCCC have forced African countries to abandon their administrative traditions. Contrasting 34 African countries’ National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) with the ways in which development aid programs have historically dealt with recipient African administrations, they use the concept of administrative blueprinting to characterize the misfit between the administrative traditions of a recipient country and the requirements from donors in terms of (good) governance principles. This has, particularly in African countries, contributed to a better understanding of why overall progress on adaptation is limited (Ford et al., 2015).

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In most of the scholarship concerning public administration, the concept of administrative traditions has focused almost explicitly on nation states. By contrast, Klein and Juhola (2018) investigate whether administrative traditions translate to fundamental differences in how the cities of Helsinki and New York have designed state—market—civil society governance arrangements for adaptation. In this latter context, administrative traditions have resulted in distinctively different trajectories of administrative reform for integrating climate change adaptation planning within the cities’ bureaucracies. The results suggest that administrative traditions matter even at the city level, where many other factors determine the uptake of adaptation measures.

Administrative Traditions as Necessary or Sufficient Conditions: Further Steps The various articles in this special issue suggest that the four dimensions of administrative traditions that we hypothesized to be important for climate change adaptation—namely law and management, state and social actors, uniformity in the making and implementing of policy, and (scientific) advice—have affected how states respond to climate change. All of the articles demonstrate that bureaucracies are currently seeking ways to navigate climate change adaptation, and that existing institutions and practices are being reconsidered. van Buuren et al. (2018) describe how the Netherlands developed new administrative structures to address the challenges posed by climate change, and how these have remained in alignment with the country’s administrative traditions. In most cases, however, the articles show that there has been only limited change within the administrative systems adopted to tackle climate-related issues and the related problems facing government bureaucracies. Indeed, much of the in-depth case studies from Bangladesh and Israel reveal efforts to align and incorporate adaptation into the states’ public management and administrative traditions. Given the findings of the comparative articles within this issue, it is clear that bureaucracies have navigated the challenges of climate change adaptation in different ways, and that these variations can be explained to some extent by each country’s respective administrative traditions. At the same time, the contributions also suggest that administrative traditions are part of a larger and more complex picture—one concerning how the public sector is responding to climate change. Clearly, one can question the influence they exert relative to the broader social and political forces shaping adaptation measures worldwide. Either way, these forces are certainly not disconnected from public bureaucracies and administrative traditions. Perhaps most importantly, the articles in this issue—and the literature more broadly—point to the fact that the government and administrative systems in question must have the political will to implement these interventions and to make them work (Giddens, 2009; Rootes, Zito, & Barry, 2012). One might expect that the majoritarian style of governing in the Anglo-American democracies would prove most effective in this area of policy, but this does not always appear to be the case. Instead, the main difference appears to be in large part a function of the low levels of commitment on the part of certain political actors to legislate in this policy area. In addition to political will, a political system must have the capacity to act, and that ability is not evenly distributed across governments (Painter & Peters, 2010). For

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example, presidentialist systems will, ceteris paribus, have more difficulties in making decisions than will parliamentary systems, given the existence of two more or less equally powerful actors (see Weaver & Rockman, 1994). Furthermore, even within those two broad categories there may be significant differences, with some presidentialist systems in Latin America (e.g., Argentina) assigning much greater latitude to presidents than do others. The economic structure of a country may also influence the creation and implementation of climate change adaptation policy. States with significant economic sectors that may be impacted by climate change—for example, those exporting timber, cocoa, coffee, and other agricultural products—are expected to have greater political interest in investing in a more sustainable economy. At the same time, of course, the level of a country’s wealth (measured in GDP) will also facilitate—or prevent—the successful incorporation of climate change adaptation policies (Berrang-Ford et al., 2014). Adaptation is expensive both in terms of direct and indirect costs, and more affluent states are in a better position to absorb them. These dimensions require further investigation regarding the extent to which administrative traditions matter vis-à-vis other political-institutional factors—a question requiring both an in-depth qualitative, as well as broader quantitative, comparative approaches. So where does this leave us with regard to further research on public bureaucracies and climate change adaptation? Several remarks can be made here. First, in light of the increasing importance of climate change adaptation for many states worldwide, as well as the global policy agenda, we can expect that many bureaucracies will be experimenting with climate change adaptation more explicitly over the next few years. At the same time, early adopting bureaucracies that have experimented with new governance arrangements are now on the verge of incorporating the lessons learned more firmly into their institutional structures, thereby providing vital insights on integration processes (or “mainstreaming”). These practical examples offer information for a much-needed critical reflection regarding how bureaucracies work in the context of climate change impacts, opening up the proverbial black box of adaptation policy and decision-making. At the same time, more nuanced understandings of the links between bureaucracy and climate change adaptation allows for more evidence-based guidance on how to improve public governance to accommodate the challenges posed by climate change. Second, the emergence of a more polycentric climate governance system offers the possibility of designing and implementing policies that are aligned to existing administrative traditions so as to prevent policy misfits. However, as demonstrated in several articles of this special issue (e.g., Vink and Schouten, 2018; Biesbroek et al., 2018; Rahman and Tosun, 2018), international donors and transnational legislation and policy, such as those furthered by the EU can—and often will—push for administrative and policy reforms, guidelines and exchanges of best practices, and specific reporting procedures. That said, ignoring the diversity of administrative traditions can have negative consequences for the uptake of adaptation measures domestically, and also result in “blueprinting”—as opposed to recognizing the richness and diversity of how states (could) respond to climate impacts. Finally, has examining adaptation as a policy area helped us to understand administrative traditions more generally? First and foremost, the papers in this special issue can be regarded as assessments of the ways in which administrative traditions were able to respond to a new challenge—demonstrating the variety of responses on the

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one hand, and the persistence of basic dimensions on the other. Other pressing issues that have recently emerged and which affect most aspects of bureaucracies (e.g., global terrorism, cyber-crime, and food-insecurity) require further reflection on what administrative traditions do, and how they influence a state’s responses to cross-cutting societal issues. Acknowledgments This paper benefitted from comments received from the participants of the INOGOV Intensive Research Workshop Administrative Traditions and Climate Change Adaptation held in Amsterdam on 19–20 April 2016. We received financial support from COST Action INOGOV (IS1309 Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects; 2014– 18). Trevelyan Wing deserves credit for language editing.

About the Authors Robbert Biesbroek is Assistant Professor at the Public Administration and Policy group of Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands. His research interests include comparative public policy, mechanisms of complex decision making, dynamics of policy (dis)integration, tracking adaptation policy, and the political and bureaucratic responses to climate change adaptation. B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interest include comparative public policy and administration and American public administration. He is also President of the International Public Policy Association. Jale Tosun is Professor of Political Science at Institute of Political Science & Heidelberg Center for the Environment, Heidelberg University. Her research concentrates on comparative public policy, international political economy, and public administration. She has published in journals such as European Journal of Political Research.

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