Project properties
Title Measuring progress of European adaptation to climate change
Group Public Administration and Policy
Project type thesis
Credits 33-39
Supervisor(s) Dr. Robbert Biesbroek
Dr. Jeroen Candel
Examiner(s) Dr. Robbert Biesbroek (PAP)
Contact info robbert.biesbroek@wur.nl
Begin date 2017/02/01
End date
Description Background:
One of the recent challenges in environmental policy is to track progress on addressing emerging societal and policy issues, particularly issues that cross the boundaries of traditional sectors of, for example, agriculture, water management, nature conservation or spatial planning. Issues that span boundaries across different areas of policy making and scales are generally characterised by messy politics and decision making processes that involve high degrees of uncertainty and controversy. Examples of such issues include food security and climate change adaptation. These issues pose specific challenges to policy-makers, because of which new policies, programmes, and plans are being developed.

These new policy efforts consist of various types of policy and policy-making. First, It is increasingly being recognized that an effective response to future climate impacts requires governance regimes and policies that transcend traditional sectoral boundaries, rather than policy-making in the ‘silos’ of current policy regimes. Policy-makers therefore attempt to come to a better coordinated and integrated set of policies. However, second, this is not to say that previous policies from the traditional regimes do not continue to exert prolonged influence as well. For example although flood risk management is not intentionally designed to deal with future climate change, it does continue to contribute to reducing future climate impacts. Additionally, a third type of new policies is intended to address climate change, but has a symbolic function, rather than that it contains any effective policy instruments.

Research objectives:
The student is asked to engage in a longitudinal analysis of adaptation policy efforts in the European Union. Using systematic data collection and analysis methods the student attempts to gain a better understanding of the development of the types of policies that are deployed throughout the EU to help Europe adapt to climate change.

Possible research questions can include:
• What types of policy efforts have been deployed to address the impacts of climate change in the EU over the years?
• Is there indeed a shift towards more intentional, substantial and better integrated adaptation policies?
• What kind of policy instruments have been deployed to address the impacts of climate change? To what extent do EU countries show similarities or convergence regarding these instruments?
• Which policy domains have been most active in climate adaptation policy? How do the efforts of these domains relate to and interact with each other?


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