Adaptation to climate change, particularly flood risks, may come to pose large challenges in the future and will require cooperation among a range of stakeholders. However, there presently exists little research especially on the integration of the private sector in adaptation. In particular, recently developed state programs for adaptation have so far been focused on the public sector. Insurance providers may have much to contribute as they offer other parts of society services to appropriately identify, assess and reduce the financial impacts of climate change-induced risks. This study aims to explore how the institutional distribution of responsibility for flood risk is being renegotiated within the UK, Germany and Netherlands. Examining how the insurance industry and the public sector can coordinate their actions to promote climate change adaptation, the study discusses how layered natural hazard insurance systems may result from attempts to deal with increasing risks due to increasing incidences of extreme events and climate change. It illustrates that concerns over the risks from extreme natural events have prompted re-assessments of the current systems, with insurance requiring long-term legislative frameworks that defines the objectives and responsibilities of insurers and the different political authorities.

A major policy innovation in China, urban renewal creates an opportunity to promote sustainable inner-city development and to foster economic growth in an environmentally and culturally sound way, which demands a close investigation of its context, internal and external dynamics, and policy features. Property-led redevelopment dominated China's urban renewal since the early 1990s, as a result of the market reform and political decentralization. Recently, it has become important to meet the interests of local communities and the diverse stakeholders in the effort to preserve the urban history and cultural fabric of cities. Contextual factors in urban renewal policy and its innovation are investigated by analyzing a pioneering case in Guangzhou from a longitudinal study approach. The impact of the structural-instrumental, cultural-institutional, and environmental perspective on policy innovation with the change of contextual factors that transformed the development ideology and the managerial practice are identified to provide a new angle of studying policy innovation in the urban field.

Climate change will result in large challenges that require societies to adapt to and manage increased risks. Regional practices of climate adaptation often take shape within multilevel governance networks in which representatives of different levels of government, policy sectors, public and private parties may discuss and negotiate potential measures. This paper aims to explore the role of leadership in enhancing the adaptive capacity of multilevel governance networks and in supporting regional practices of climate adaptation. The paper reviews two initiatives toward climate adaptation, the WaalWeelde initiative in the Netherlands and the Manhood Peninsula Partnership in the UK, based on policy documentation and analysis of in total 17 semistructured interviews with public and private actors. The study illustrates both the large differences in organization of water management, spatial planning, and flood risk policies, as well as strong similarities in the way in which leadership may contribute to the development of initiatives.

This paper aims to better understand the role of leadership in regional climate change adaptation. We first present a framework, which distinguishes five functions of leadership within inter-organizational networks: the connective, enabling, adaptive, political–administrative and dissemination functions. Next, we compare the role of leadership in two examples of regional adaptation practices which were initiated by governmental actors with two examples which were initiated by non-governmental actors. The case studies are located in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Our research question is twofold: to what extent can the five functions of leadership be identified in practices of climate change adaptation, and are there differences in the patterns of leadership between adaptation practices which are initiated by governmental and by non-governmental actors? The study shows that although all leadership functions were fulfilled in all four cases, patterns of leadership were different and the fulfilment of leadership functions posed different challenges to non-governmental actors and governmental actors.

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