In the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) crisis, uncertain and experimental forms of governance have emerged. Administrative routines and established management techniques have dissolved amid emergency actions and management by the state of exception. We refer to these emerging governance forms as transformative governance. Discussing examples from Switzerland, we illustrate how policy responses to COVID‐19 reflect transformative governance. These examples raise four issues that characterize transformative governance research and practice: (i) the evidence base of policy‐making; (ii) the role of the state in transformative governance; (iii) the potential of experimental governance; and (iv) the paradigms driving policy change. Our study demonstrates that these issues imply different opportunities and risks of transformative governance, which we discuss in detail.

Landscape quality has become a fundamental issue in the development of renewable energy (henceforth abbreviated RE) projects. Rapid technological advances in RE production and distribution, coupled with changing policy frameworks, bring specific challenges during planning in order to avoid degradation of landscape quality. The current work provides a comprehensive review on RE landscapes and the impacts of RE systems on landscape for most European countries. It is based on a review by an interdisciplinary international team of experts of empirical research findings on landscape impacts of RE from thirty-seven countries that have participated in the COST Action TU1401 Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality (RELY).

With some level of climate change now inevitable, climate policy around the world has evolved in recent decades to include adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most industrialized countries have formulated national adaptation strategies to meet this challenge. However, the implementation of on‐the‐ground measures is lagging. To analyze the implementation process and possible reasons for the implementation gap, we take a closer look at how the integration of adaptation goals into various sectoral policies—often called mainstreaming—has been handled on different administrative levels in Switzerland. Going beyond traditional compilations of barriers to climate change adaptation, we analyze the use of six different mainstreaming strategies across cases and levels and the reasons for their success or lack thereof. We find that different actors at all administrative levels have successfully employed programmatic mainstreaming in combination with inter‐organizational mainstreaming to foster horizontal cooperation. We call this strategy cooperative mainstreaming. Some pioneers even managed to channel their successes into advances in regulatory mainstreaming. However, the lack of systematic regulatory and directed mainstreaming on the national and cantonal levels largely limits adaptation actions on lower levels to those cases where the major impetus derives from extreme events or proactive individuals on the ground. We conclude that the adaptation implementation gap in Switzerland largely stems from the lack of political commitment to promoting local adaptation at the national and cantonal levels.

Climate change severely affects Alpine regions. Adaptation to climate change is needed in order to deal with these impacts, but the implementation of national adaptation strategies is inhibited by multiple obstacles. Regional strategic frameworks are just emerging, adaptation is of little priority to local agendas and policy mainstreaming is limited on all administrative levels. This paper provides a better understanding of the governance of adaptation to climate change in Switzerland, an example of a federal system with a strong focus on subnational levels and multilevel governance. We conceptualize governance as a network of policies, measures, actors and knowledge, and visualize their interactions using D3.js, a data-driven JavaScript library. The findings illustrate the typical division of labour in federal multilevel governance systems. The national level provides a strategic framework and funding and conducts coordinating measures at subnational levels, especially the local-level implementation of concrete measures. Conducting comparable mappings for other countries would allow interesting comparisons and insights into common barriers and opportunities to adaptation to climate change.

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