This paper directs attention to conditions for climate adaptation as an important part of governing climate change in the local arena. Empirical focus is put on attempts to manage flood risks by means of risk management and planning in two Swedish municipalities. Following the need to widen our understanding of how, when and under what conditions climate adaptation occurs, three challenges are particularly emphasized from the case studies: facing the safety vs. scenery conflict where political priorities and reducing societal vulnerabilities prove difficult; the process of deciding what to adapt to, in which the troublesome role of knowledge is striking; and finally, taking responsibility for measures of flood protection. At the end of the paper, analytical generalizations illustrate the need to give increased attention to institutional challenges and challenges emanating from the science-policy interface in order to come to terms with the implementation deficit in governing climate change in the local arena. Adaptation as Part of Governing Climate ChangeGoverning climate change calls for implementation of policies, programmes and strategies at international, national, regional and local levels of society.

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Transformative adaptation is described as decisive to mitigating risks and to seizing opportunities from a changing climate, requiring new ways of governing, planning and collaborating, alongside technical innovations. Building municipal capacities for citizen participation in adaptation is important to enabling such transformational changes but remains challenging. By applying capacities distilled from the literature on Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance in a Swedish municipal case, this study aims to disentangle key limits for, and innovations to strengthen, local capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation. Interviews with municipal officials, focus groups with citizens, and document analyses were employed to analyse how climate adaptation and citizen participation are governed, and how these policy areas are interacting and could be bridged. The study points at conditions that foremost prevent bridging established policies and practices on adaptation and citizen participation, stemming from the different logics and distribution of responsibility within, and lacking collaboration between, these separated policy areas. The analysis concludes that potential ways to enable citizen participation in adaptation involve: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups for participation; co‐designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyse and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.

It is increasingly expected that private actors play the role as entrepreneurs and frontrunners in implementing climate measures, whereas empirical studies of the position, role and engagement of private actors are scarce. Situated in the context of urban planning, a critical arena for triggering climate transitions, the aim of this paper is to explore how Swedish property developers respond to climate change. Qualitative analyses of corporate policy documents and semi-structured interviews with property developers reveal a vast divergence between the written policies, where leadership ambitions are high, and how the practice of property development is discussed in interviews. In the latter there is little evidence of property developers pursuing a forward-looking or cutting-edge climate change agenda. Instead they are critical of increased public regulation for climate-oriented measures. Explanations both confirm previous studies, highlighting lack of perceived customer demand, uncertainty of financial returns and limited innovations, and add new elements of place-dependency suggesting that innovative and front-runner practices can only be realized in the larger urban areas. Municipalities seeking to improve their climate-oriented profile in urban planning by involving private property developers need to develop strategies to maneuver the variance in responses to increase the effectiveness of implementation.