ABSTRACT. Developing an approach to governing adaptation to climate change is severely hampered by the dictatorship of the present when the needs of future generations are inadequately represented in current policy making. We posit this problem as a function of the attributes of adaptation policy making, including deep uncertainty and nonstationarity, where past observations are not reliable predictors of future outcomes. Our research links organizational decision-making attributes with adaptation decision making and identifies cases in which adaptation actions cause spillovers, free riding, and distributional impacts. We develop a governing framework for adaptation that we believe will enable policy, planning, and major long-term development decisions to be made appropriately at all levels of government in the face of the deep uncertainty and nonstationarity caused by climate change. Our framework requires that approval of projects with an expected life span of 30 years or more in the built environment include minimum building standards that integrate forecasted climate change impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) intermediate scenario. The intermediate IPCC scenario must be downscaled to include local or regional temperature, water availability, sea level rise, susceptibility to forest fires, and human habitation impacts to minimize climate-change risks to the built environment. The minimum standard is systematically updated every six years to facilitate learning by formal and informal organizations. As a minimum standard, the governance framework allows jurisdictions to take stronger actions to increase their climate resilience and thus maintain system flexibility.

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It is a long-held belief among scholars and practitioners that the State of California is a notable subnational leader in environmental and climate change policy. This article focuses primarily on four essential contextual factors that explain why and how within the United States’ federal system of government California has become such an important leader, performing far in excess of the national government and most other states. These essential factors are preferences, authority, capacity, and effectiveness. The article then moves to the multifaceted implementation strategy California policy makers have employed to realize their environmental goals. Finally, despite the history of strong leadership, the state continues to face a host of significant challenges in realizing its ambitious climate change goals for the coming decades.

For all its economic capacity, population size, and resource base, California remains only one among the 50 United States and, essentially, is a subnational actor attempting to play a role in the climate change policy arena on par with the nation-states of the world. This raises a series of questions about the substance and breadth of the state's new policy and what has motivated it. The state's policy declarations and initial flurry of activities are impressive. As with all so broad and sweeping initiatives, it remains to be seen the extent to which policy goals can and will be translated into operational rules and regulations, incentives and sanctions, and actual accomplishments across all the sectors of the state's economy over the course of not just months and years but the decades to come.