Session 7. 4. A.

As cities face increasing climate risks, the urgency to implement effective adaptation measures has never been greater. Despite cities' central role in climate adaptation, there is limited understanding of whether the measures outlined in their adaptation plans adequately address the risks they face. This study analyzes 137 climate adaptation plans from European cities to identify the climate risks and measures included, using structural topic modeling (STM). By examining the co-occurrence of risks and measures, we aim to uncover potential mismatches between the risks that cities identify and the measures they propose to mitigate them. We expect our analysis to reveal notable trends in adaptation planning across different city sizes, regions, and governance structures, highlighting disparities in how cities prioritize risks and implement adaptation actions. We hypothesize that while some cities align their measures with specific climate risks, others focus on more general adaptation efforts, potentially overlooking key vulnerabilities. This research contributes to the growing field of computational text analysis in climate adaptation scholarship, offering insights into the complex dynamics of local climate governance and the factors influencing adaptation planning. We anticipate that addressing these misalignments could enhance the effectiveness of urban climate adaptation strategies and support more resilient urban futures.

Effective governance of common-pool resources relies on well-defined institutions that guide the proper management of shared natural resources. Decision-making processes in response to collective action dilemmas are influenced by the diversity of rules, norms and strategies, which enable multiple responses for communities facing uncertainties across diverse socio-economic, environmental, and political contexts. Our study examines four common-pool resources governance systems (forestry, fishery, pastoralism, and irrigation) from Europe, Africa, and South America. For each case, we applied the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework’s rules typology, a novel taxonomy of rules, and the Institutional Grammar to decompose the institutional arrangements and classify them in rules, norms and strategies. We measured institutional diversity through the calculation of the alpha and beta diversity, tools borrowed from the life sciences to quantify the richness of rules and to compare the diversity of rules within and across governance systems. Results revealed significant differences in institutional configurations, highlighting dissimilarities in the number and type of rules, taxonomies and the grammatical elements among the case studies. Beta diversity reflected two key processes that shaped the institutional configurations in the case studies: the replacement of rules that are absent in one case but present in another (turnover), and the presence of specific rules that are absent in other case studies, without being replaced by additional rules (nestedness). The partitioning of beta diversity enabled us to identify the mechanisms that modulate institutional diversity by influencing the equivalences and divergences of rules, norms and strategies amidst diverse governance systems. Furthermore, the linkages and connections of different types of rules underscored the complexity of these systems at the management of the shared natural resources. These results highlight the importance of recognizing institutional diversity when developing adaptive management strategies for the governance of common-pool resources.