Challenging barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation

Adaptation is considered to be a necessary response to manage the unavoidable impacts of climate change. Even though societies have always adapted to socioecological changes, climate change is expected to require additional adaptation efforts. Examples from policy practice demonstrate that adaptation is not a straightforward, barrier-free process. Removing these barriers is considered a precondition to ensure successful societal adaptation. The burgeoning literature on climate change adaptation has been unable to move beyond itemizing the barriers to adaptation and has developed static and linear views on how to overcome them. This thesis seeks to openup the black box of barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation by cycling between the empirical manifestation of barriers and the conceptual understanding of barriers so as to develop a meaningful way to analyse them. To this end, a combination of theories is used in a mixed method research design allowing for a robust and diverse exploration of the barriers to adaptation.