Editing IPCC:AR6/SROCC/Chapter-4 (section)

==== 4.4.3.1 Introduction ====

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Governance is pivotal to shaping SLR responses. The assessment of SLR responses above has shown that each type of response raises specific governance challenges associated with the distribution of costs, benefits and negative consequences of responses across societal actors. Hence, SLR responses require governance efforts if social conflicts are to be resolved and mutual opportunities amongst all actors realised. Generally, responses involve the interaction of diverse public and private actors at different levels of decision making with divergent values, interests and goals on coastal activities, lifestyles, livelihoods, risks, resilience and sustainability ( ''high confidence'' ; Dovers and Hezri, 2010; Foerster et al., 2015; Giddens, 2015; Mills et al., 2016; Dolšak and Prakash, 2018; Hinkel et al., 2018; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018; AR5). This leads to a number of overarching governance challenges that arise from the nature of SLR, which will be assessed in this section.

While there is a substantial literature on coastal governance, little attention has been focused explicitly on SLR governance, as was also the case in AR5 (Wong et al., 2014). Furthermore, much of the adaptation governance literature has focused on putting forward normative prescriptions on how governance arrangements ought to be (e.g., transformative governance; Chaffin et al., 2016), but with limited empirical evidence on the actual effectiveness of these prescriptions (Klostermann et al., 2018; Runhaar et al., 2018). Hence, understanding the social mechanisms leading to the emergence of particular governance arrangements, and how effective they are in addressing climate change and SLR, is limited (Wong et al., 2014; Bisaro and Hinkel, 2016; Oberlack, 2017; Bisaro et al., 2018; Roggero et al., 2018a; Roggero et al., 2018b). An important post-AR5 development has thus been to move beyond descriptions and normative prescriptions about ‘good governance’ to explore which factors help (called enablers) or hinder (called barriers) how social choices are made and implemented on complex issues like climate change and SLR, as elaborated in the next subsection.

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