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Profile picture of Åsa Knaggård. Photo.

Åsa Knaggård

Associate professor | Senior lecturer | Researcher CEC | Principal investigator BECC | Health and safety representative | Recognised Teaching Practitioner

Profile picture of Åsa Knaggård. Photo.

Disrupting climate adaptation lock‑ins? : Swedish local civil servants’ strategies to enable adaptation

Author

  • Åsa Knaggård
  • Kerstin Eriksson
  • Erik Persson

Summary, in English

Local climate adaptation is constrained and steered along specific paths by various mechanisms, which together form a lock-in. The study focuses on Swedish local civil servants’ strategies to deal with climate adaption lock-ins and to what extent the strategies disrupt the lock-ins. Interviews were conducted with civil servants in six municipalities, complemented by inter-views at regional and national public agencies. The study investigates the presence of physical infrastructural, institutional, mental/cognitive, and discursive lock-in mechanisms and finds that they together limit and steer local civil servants’ work on climate adaptation. The study shows that the lock-in mechanisms are dealt with by civil servants through two types of strategies. Influencing strategies target others to change their thinking, behavior, or decisions, while subversive strategies involve ignoring, violating, or undermining formal and informal institutions. Civil servants used influencing strategies to mitigate several types of lock-in mechanisms. The strategies had a higher impact when targeted at mental/cognitive mechanisms, as influencing others to change their mindsets and practices widened opportunity spaces. This increased the possibilities to disrupt also other types of lock-in mechanisms. Civil servants also employed subversive strategies in the form of disregard-ing the legislation, departmentalization, mindsets, and practices. The subversive strategies were successful in, for example, enabling decisions, but did not weaken the lock-in mechanisms. The study shows that to disrupt climate adaptation lock-ins, civil servants need to use influencing strategies to sequentially target lock-in mechanisms.

Department/s

  • Department of Political Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC)
  • LU Profile Area: Nature-based future solutions
  • Practical Philosophy

Publishing year

2025-03-21

Language

English

Publication/Series

Regional Environmental Change

Volume

25

Issue

47

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media B.V.

Topic

  • Public Administration Studies

Keywords

  • Climate adaptation
  • Lock-in
  • Influencing and subversive strategies
  • Local civil servants
  • Sweden

Status

Published

Project

  • Responsibility for Climate Adaptation Across Political Levels, Sectors and Public-Private Boundaries
  • Sustainable Distribution of Responsibility for Climate Change Adaptation

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1436-378X