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

==== 4.4.3.2 Understanding Barriers to Adaptation as Governance Challenges ====

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AR5 stated that there are many reasons why adaptation governance is complex (Klein et al., 2014). The first generation of studies that investigated this question empirically identified many (lists of) barriers that people have experienced in adaptation governance in specific case contexts, including political, institutional, social-cognitive, economic, financial, biophysical and technical barriers (Klein et al., 2014). Although insightful for these specific cases, including SLR (Hinkel et al., 2018), accumulation of empirical findings in building theory proved to be limited, and it did not result in more evidence-informed advice to policy makers on how to deal with barriers (Biesbroek et al., 2013; Eisenack et al., 2014).

In response, in a second generation of studies, several frameworks have been proposed and tested to advance scholarship on barriers to adaptation (Eisenack and Stecker, 2012; Barnett et al., 2015; Lehmann et al., 2015; Bisaro and Hinkel, 2016). A frequently used framework was developed by Moser and Ekstrom (2010) who identified and linked key barriers to certain stages of the policy process: understanding, planning and management stages. Moser and Ekstrom (2010) argue that conditions, such as the scope and scale of adaptation, have significant implications for which barriers are activated in the policy process, and how persistent and difficult they are to overcome. This and other frameworks have been applied in a diversity of contexts, providing valuable insights about the governance challenges involved in adapting to climate change and suggestions for improvement (Ekstrom and Moser, 2014; Rosendo et al., 2018; Thaler et al., 2019).

A recent generation of studies takes more theory based approaches and includes contextual factors to analyse the key social mechanisms that explain why adaptation processes are often complex, result in deadlocks, delays or even failure (Biesbroek et al., 2014; Eisenack et al., 2014; Wellstead et al., 2014; Biesbroek et al., 2015; Bisaro and Hinkel, 2016; Oberlack and Eisenack, 2018; Sieber et al., 2018; Wellstead et al.). Such insights are critical as they can be used by practitioners for policy design (e.g., to prevent certain deadlocks from emerging by (re)designing contextual conditions), or provide insights on strategic interventions in ongoing processes to revitalise deadlocked adaptation governance (Biesbroek et al., 2017).

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