The extant literature focuses more on the patterns and the driving forces of climate adaptation at the local level in Western institutional settings. However, local governments in China have also taken diverse adaptation actions to realize the national blueprint for carbon emission reduction. Thus, it comes to the research questions: why do local governments differ in climate adaptation actions? More specifically, what are combinations of factors and their leading mechanisms that account for local climate adaptation actions in China? To that end, this study adopts the theoretical framework of social-ecological systems (SES) to conceptualize the underlying patterns for diverse climate adaptation actions of local governments. An archetype analysis is conducted by a large-N QCA (qualitative comparative analysis) approach to extract combinations of factors that lead to diverse local climate adaptation actions from 289 cities in China, corroborating the theoretical hypotheses with a robustness test of FCA (formal concept analysis) approach. The research findings show that: (1) in the region with high level of economic development, the local government tends to take long-term adaptation actions (e.g., green infrastructure investment, personnel training, knowledge dissemination) to mitigate its endowment disadvantages and avoid the potential impacts of climate hazards on local economy, driven by the economic incentive that further increases its fiscal revenue; (2) in the less developed region, the local government tends to take short-term adaptation actions (e.g., instant plans for flooding and drought) to exploit its endowment advantages and tackle the immediate climate hazards, driven by the political incentive that magnifies its political performance of ensuring and improving people’s livelihoods and social-ecological security. This study highlights the underlying patterns for local diversity of climate adaptation actions with large-scale empirical evidence and contributes to a better understanding of governing the climate commons in transitional countries.
