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• For policymakers, sandscaping has bought time to prepare for managed realignment. • For residents, sandscaping has bought time to postpone it. • Increased sense of security of future coastal change for some local residents. • This is due to perceived importance of Bacton Gas Terminal. • Reduced concern of future erosion could lead to a risk of maladaptation. Much of England's coastline is underprepared for adapting to long-term coastal change, with many coastal areas moving from 'hold the line' to managed realignment as this century progresses. This paper offers a unique case study of a frontage experiencing this transition. It explores the perspectives of Bacton and Walcott residents and coastal policymakers on managing the risk of coastal change for the Bacton-Walcott frontage on the Norfolk coast (UK), after the projected lifetime of a nature-based solution (NBS), known as sandscaping. Drawing upon survey and interview data, this research finds local residents have an increased sense of security of future coastal change through the perceived importance of the nearby Bacton Gas Terminal (currently supplying up to a third of the UK's gas supply), and the protection afforded to it by sandscaping. For policymakers, sandscaping has bought time to prepare for managed realignment, whereas for residents, sandscaping has bought time to postpone it. There is a risk of maladaptation if reduced concern of future erosion affects willingness to engage in coastal adaptation in the present. This case study highlights the multiple temporal and spatial interests in coastal management, where decision-making at a local level has national-scale implications for domestic energy supply, and where novel nature-based solutions may bring additional uncertainty and complexity to building social resilience. It provides insights on the challenges of anticipatory adaptation, which is of relevance to other coastal areas looking to mitigate climate impacts and better prepare against future risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores place disruption, where transformative adaptation was proposed for flood risk management, by examining: a) the relationships between place attachment, place-related symbolic meanings, place-protective interpretative responses and attitudinal responses, and b) evaluation of governance processes. Questionnaires were administered to residents in Clontarf, County Dublin, Ireland in 2014 ( n  = 280) in the aftermath of community resistance to perceived transformative flood defences. Results highlight the dilemmas for individuals who recognise adaptation as necessary but who ascribe significant importance to valued places. Contrary to previous studies, our analysis shows place attachment to be strongest in individuals who perceive governance processes as inadequate, and finds that neither flood experience nor flood risk affect strength of place attachment and support for flood defences. We suggest that where transformative adaptation disrupts place and threatens place attachment, considering the views of both those affected and unaffected by hazardous events is paramount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role playing is increasingly used in European Studies and political science, to foster students' understanding of social science theories. Generally, role playing is only done by students. Not so in Theoretical Theatre, a teaching innovation which puts the onus on teachers to act. In our performances, teachers embody competing theories and enact dramatic scenarios in front of, and in collaboration with, their student audience. We explain how we developed Theoretical Theatre and contextualise it in the pedagogical literature of games and simulations, and of Drama In Education. We reflect on our experience of performing across four modules since 2012, and on our students' feedback, to discuss three key themes emerging from our practice: making theory more interesting and engaging, easier to understand and apply; and changing classroom dynamics and engagement. We outline the challenges and opportunities in sustaining this teaching method and transferring it to other settings and disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stakeholder participation in environmental management has become widespread globally while the normative benefits of multi-stakeholder processes in governing natural resources are promoted by academics and policy makers. As projections indicate more frequent and intense flood events with future climate change, this article examines one stakeholder participation process within UK flood risk management to evaluate whether it contributes to enhancing effective engagement, through social learning. Evidence is derived from multiple interviews conducted within the England's Regional Flood and Coastal Committees (RFCCs), which were specifically introduced to better integrate local level interests in regional flood defence decision-making. In testing a modified ‘individual-community interaction’ learning framework, it is apparent that personal and group learning outcomes were evident to varying degrees, suggesting that stakeholder participation was relatively successful. However, our analysis suggests that flexibility exists within such structures, allowing reflexive reconstitution to further increase social learning. Recommendations for future stakeholder participation are proposed, providing lessons for both UK flood governance and similar flood risk management processes in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) produced 700 policy recommendations 2009–20. • Its recommendations have become more cross-sectoral and clearer in their addressee. • Nearly half of its recommendations have been repeated over time. • More research is needed to understand when and why advice is (not) used by policymakers. Despite the recent proliferation of national climate change advisory bodies, very little is known about what advice they provide, to whom, and when. To address these gaps in the literature, this article systematically analyses all 700 of the recommendations made by the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) in the period 2009–20. The CCC is one of the oldest climate change advisory bodies of its kind in the world and its design has been widely emulated by other countries. For the first time, this article documents how the CCC's mitigation and adaptation recommendations have changed over time with respect to their addressee, sectoral focus and policy targets. It reveals that they became: more numerous per year; more cross-sectoral in their nature; clearer in targeting a specific addressee; and more focused in referring to specific policy targets. By drawing on Fischer's synthesis of policy evaluation to derive a measure of policy ambition, it also reveals that despite many of its recommendations being repeated year after year, the CCC has become more willing to challenge the policy status quo. It concludes by identifying future research needs in this important and fast-moving area of climate governance, notably understanding the conditions in which the recommendations of advisory bodies (do not) impact national policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processes that lead to radical institutional change in environmental governance have been theorised from various different perspectives. Six years ago an article published in Global Environmental Change argued for a more systematic evaluation of the potential and utility of complementing Kingdon's Streams Model with other policy-making explanatory approaches. Although Brunner's (2008) article highlighted various limitations of the framework, and suggested employing it with other lenses, only one other attempt has been made to date. This paper explores the value of combining Kingdon's model with Discursive Institutionalism which argues that a focus on discourse has significant, although as yet unfulfilled, potential for shedding new light on institutional change through explaining actor preferences, strategies and normative alignment. By evaluating these arguments in one significant recent example of radical institutional innovation, the UK Climate Change Act 2008, this article shows that by examining discursive interventions, in addition to more structural determinants, significant new insight can be generated into the conditions under which change can occur. The results have implications for theorising radical institutional innovation and also engage in wider debates on governing complex sustainability issues such as climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change impacts on marine environments have been somewhat neglected in climate change research, particularly with regard to their social dimensions and implications. This paper contributes to addressing this gap through presenting a UK focused mixed-method study of how publics frame, understand and respond to marine climate change-related issues. It draws on data from a large national survey of UK publics ( N = 1,001), undertaken in January 2011 as part of a wider European survey, in conjunction with in-depth qualitative insights from a citizens’ panel with participants from the East Anglia region, UK. This reveals that discrete marine climate change impacts, as often framed in technical or institutional terms, were not the most immediate or significant issues for most respondents. Study participants tended to view these climate impacts ‘in context’, in situated ways, and as entangled with other issues relating to marine environments and their everyday lives. Whilst making connections with scientific knowledge on the subject, public understandings of marine climate impacts were mainly shaped by personal experience, the visibility and proximity of impacts, sense of personal risk and moral or equity-based arguments. In terms of responses, study participants prioritised climate change mitigation measures over adaptation, even in high-risk areas. We consider the implications of these insights for research and practices of public engagement on marine climate impacts specifically, and climate change more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been claimed that high social capital contributes to both positive public health outcomes and to climate change adaptation. Strong social networks have been said to support individuals and collective initiatives of adaptation and enhance resilience. As a result, there is an expectation that social capital could reduce vulnerability to risks from the impacts of climate change in the health sector. This paper examines evidence on the role social networks play in individuals’ responses to heat wave risk in a case study in the UK. Based on interviews with independently living elderly people and their primary social contacts in London and Norwich, we suggest that strong bonding networks could potentially exacerbate rather than reduce the vulnerability of elderly people to the effects of heat waves. Most respondents interviewed did not feel that heat waves posed a significant risk to them personally, and most said that they would be able to cope with hot weather. Bonding networks could perpetuate rather than challenge these narratives and therefore contribute to vulnerability rather than ameliorating it. These results suggest a complex rather than uniformly positive relationship between social capital, health and adaptation to climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Attempts by researchers and policy-makers to address the ‘wicked’ issues which pervade environmental policy usually revolve around attempting – or recommending – both more participatory and transparent, and more systematic and evidence-based, policy-making. Post-normal science (PNS), with its ‘extended peer community’, has emerged as one approach, whilst others focus on procedural reforms of the policy process, particularly on enhancing democratic decision-making. This paper applies a novel analytical framework to a primarily documentary analysis of three cases we argue are wicked—Canadian regulatory review of health products and food, European union (EU) environmental thematic strategies, and United Kingdom (UK) energy and climate change policy. It explores how various responses to wicked issues are implemented, through the ‘lenses’ of PNS and, more generally, ‘democratic and effective decision-making’. It finds such responses are often limited by practical and fundamental barriers relating to handling of uncertainty, issue framing, participation, power, politics, and attitude to evidence. We draw conclusions about future research on PNS, particularly the need to more clearly relate theory to different strands of literature on the evidence–policy-making relationship, and to continue empirical testing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interactions between these different expressions of climate change by focusing on the idea of ‘normal’ climates defined by statistics. We show how this idea came into being in meteorological circles and then review how this idea of climatic normality gets entangled with cultural and psychological processes. Using data from historical and predicted climates in the UK, we illustrate the significance of choosing different baseline ‘normals’ for retrospective and prospective interpretations of climate change. Since the choice of these statistical ‘normals’ reflects cultural, political and psychological preferences and practices as much as scientific ones, we argue that expectations of the climatic future are influenced by social as well as statistical norms. Seeing climate as co-constructed between the psycho-cultural constraints of society and the physical constraints of the material world offers a different way of thinking about the instabilities of climate and the ways we adapt to them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The UK is witnessing a new line in political debate around new nuclear energy generation as one potential feature of future energy policy, specifically for contributing to climate change mitigation alongside energy security. Little is known about how ordinary citizens might be responding to this reframing. This paper reports the results from a major British survey (n=1491) undertaken in the autumn of 2005. The consistent message is that while higher proportions of the British public are prepared to accept nuclear power if they believe it contributes to climate change mitigation, this is a highly conditional view, with very few actively preferring this over renewable sources given the choice. People see both climate change and nuclear power as problematic in terms of risks and express only a ‘reluctant acceptance’ of nuclear power as a ‘solution’ to climate change. The combined data from this survey can also be interpreted as an indication of the complexity surrounding beliefs about energy futures and the difficulty of undertaking simplistic risk–risk tradeoffs within any single framing of the issues; such as nuclear energy versus climate change. The results also indicate that it would be unwise, in the UK as elsewhere, to simplistically assume that there exists any single or stable public ‘opinion’ on such complex matters. We conclude with a discussion of the role and implications of the survey evidence for the policy process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports on the barriers that members of the UK public perceive to engaging with climate change. It draws upon three mixed-method studies, with an emphasis on the qualitative data which offer an in-depth insight into how people make sense of climate change. The paper defines engagement as an individual''s state, comprising three elements: cognitive, affective and behavioural. A number of common barriers emerge from the three studies, which operate broadly at ‘individual’ and ‘social’ levels. These major constraints to individual engagement with climate change have implications for achieving significant reductions in greenhouse gases in the UK. We argue that targeted and tailored information provision should be supported by wider structural change to enable citizens and communities to reduce their carbon dependency. Policy implications for effective engagement are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

It has long been acknowledged that understandings of risk are influenced by external or ‘objective’ assessments, and by internal or ‘subjective’ value judgements. In-depth research has been undertaken on how lay people perceive climate change and related risks, whereas work on expert opinions is more limited. This paper reports on 22 ‘expert’ interpretations elicited through a mental models approach, and encapsulated in a ‘meta’-influence diagram, denoting three conceptualisations of danger in relation to climate change: (i) human influence upon the climate system; (ii) impacts upon natural and human communities; and (iii) threat to the status quo, especially in the form of mitigation measures and related costs. These conceptualisations raise questions about how experts bring to bear their knowledge, values and understanding of climatic and social systems in articulating such discourses. This paper also discusses the implications of such diverse perspectives on managing climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Virtually intractable matters characterized by uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes, call for post-normal policy responses. This paper explores how two such responses have been implemented in the UK through the management of specific aspects of anthropogenic climate change and human genetics, which we argue can be described as “wicked” or post-normal issues. To address these, approaches require that a broader range of epistemic positions and worldviews be recognized as valid in the policy development process. We suggest that the concept of boundary organisations is well suited to examine some of the institutions that have been set up in the UK to deal with the two post-normal issues we consider here. This paper explores the extent to which the UK Climate Impacts Programme and the Human Genetics Commission respond to a post-normal policy approach and their achievements in overcoming epistemological boundaries and effecting integrated management responses. We conclude by considering the insights such an analysis offers into operationalising post-normal policy approaches. As intermediaries and facilitators, we suggest the two organisations can be considered forerunners in applying a post-normal approach to climate change adaptation and human genetics, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Stakeholders appraised the feasibility of greenhouse gas removal supply chains. • A supply chain framing enabled a granular appraisal of 'real-world' feasibility. • Multicriteria mapping identified diverse appraisal criteria. • Afforestation generally scored higher than BECCS supply chains within appraisals. • Farming community and global cooperation are key factors affecting realisation. Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) approaches are considered essential in several projections to meet the climate mitigation ambition of the Paris Agreement. Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and afforestation are included extensively in mitigation scenarios but there are concerns about the feasibility of these approaches. This was explored with stakeholders from industry, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and policy who were involved in interviews and a one-day participatory workshop. Multicriteria mapping (MCM) methodology was used to appraise the 'real-world' feasibility of four specific greenhouse gas removal supply chains at a granular level in the UK context. The MCM analysis shows that afforestation performs better in comparison to three BECCS supply chains, on criteria such as business model, social acceptability, and environmental sustainability. This innovative application of the MCM methodology enables the abstract representations of GGR in integrated assessment models to be explored at a more granular level through a supply chain analysis and thus gain a deeper understanding of the issues facing these approaches. The data gathered allows a wide range of technical, environmental, social and political criteria to be systematically applied in appraising the practical performance of different future implementation options for afforestation and BECCS. If these GGR supply chains are to become a reality on the scale required for 1.5 °C global warming, factors such as global cooperation, land availability, and the longevity of policies and incentives were found to be major challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• To limit global warming to 1.5 °C, greenhouse gas removal technologies are proposed. • Feasibility of these technologies focus on techno-economic and biophysical factors. • Stakeholder elicitation maps key issues and feasibility of afforestation and BECCS. • Analysis of key issues in integrated assessment modelling (IAM) reveals gaps. • A responsible assessment approach advocates complementary methods to IAMs. Greenhouse gas removal technologies and practices are essential to bring emissions to net zero and limit global warming to 1.5 °C. To achieve this, the majority of integrated assessment models (IAMs), that generate future emissions scenarios and inform the international policy process, use large-scale afforestation and biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The feasibility of these technologies and practices has only so far been considered from a relatively narrow techno-economic or biophysical perspective. Here, we present one of the first studies to elicit perspectives through an expert mapping process to open up and broaden the discussion around feasibility of afforestation and BECCS. Our stakeholders included business and industry, non-governmental organisations and policy makers, spanning expertise in bioenergy, forestry, CCS and climate change. Perspectives were elicited on (1) issues relating to BECCS with large-scale afforestation, and (2) specific criteria for assessing feasibility. Participants identified 12 main themes with 61 sub-themes around issues, and 11 main themes with 33 sub-themes around feasibility criteria. Our findings show important societal and governance aspects of feasibility that are currently under-represented, specifically issues around real-world complexity, competing human needs, justice and ethics. Unique to the use of these technologies for greenhouse gas removal are issues around temporal and spatial scale, and greenhouse gas accounting. Using these expert insights, we highlight where IAMs currently poorly capture these concerns. These broader, often more qualitative perspectives, issues and uncertainties must be recognised and accounted for, in order to understand the real-world feasibility of large-scale afforestation and BECCS and the role they play in limiting climate change. These considerations enable widening the scope to broader and deeper discussions about possible and desirable futures, beyond a focus on achieving net-zero emissions, attentive to the effects such decisions may have. We outline approaches that can be used to attend to the complex social and political dimensions that IAMs do not render. By complementing IAMs in this way opportunities can be created to open up considerations of future options and alternatives beyond those framings proposed by IAMs, creating opportunities for inclusion of knowledges, reflexivity and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers are beginning to intensify their search for policies that assist society to adapt to the unfolding impacts of climate change at the local level. This paper forms the second part of two part a examination of the potential for using scenarios in adaptation and vulnerability assessment. Part I explained how climate change and socio-economic scenarios can be integrated to better understand the complex inter-relationships between a changing climate and a dynamically evolving social system. This second part describes how a broadly representative sample of public, private and voluntary organisations in theEast Anglian region of the UK responded to the scenarios, and identifies future research priorities. The main findings are that integrated socio-economic and climate scenarios applied `bottom up' to locallyimportant stakeholders: (1) provide a sophisticated and dynamic mechanism to explore the potential feedbacks between natural and human systems; (2) offer a means to understand the vulnerability and adaptivecapacity of different exposure units; (3) promote social learning byencouraging participants to assess the adequacy of their existing climate strategies for longer than their normal planning periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change policies currently pay disproportionately greater attention to the mitigation of climate change through emission reductions strategies than to adaptation measures. Realising that the world isalready committed to some global warming, policy makers are beginning to turn their attention to the challenge of preparing society to adapt to the unfolding impacts at the local level. This two-part article presents an integrated, or `co-evolutionary', approach to using scenarios in adaptation and vulnerability assessment. Part I explains how climate and social scenarios can be integrated to better understandthe inter-relationships between a changing climate and the dynamic evolution of social, economic and political systems. The integrated scenarios are then calibrated so that they can be applied `bottom up' to local stakeholders in vulnerable sectors of the economy. Part I concludes that a co-evolutionary approach (1) produces a more sophisticated and dynamic account of the potential feedbacks between natural and human systems; (2) suggests that sustainability indicators are botha potentially valuable input to and an output of integrated scenarioformulation and application. Part II describes how a broadly representative sample of public, private and voluntary organisations in the East Anglian region of the UK responded to the scenarios, and identifies future research priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]