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While there is a growing literature on the institutional and scalar aspects of governance for adaptation, there remain very few studies that seek to explain how the public imagines the governance of adaptation across scales. Knowing public imaginaries of adaptation governance is important for the legitimacy and efficacy of adaptation processes. In this paper, we explain how the public imagines the governance of adaptation across scales, based on 80 in-depth interviews with coastal residents in south-eastern Australia. We find an overwhelming preference for government leadership on adaptation, little appetite for exclusively non-government responsibility regimes, and limited desire for shared public/private responsibility regimes. Participant responses indicate a broad preference for a multilevel government governance model, with responsibility weighted at local and national scales. This preference for a strong but distributed government function is at odds with the emerging tendency of governments to shift the weight of responsibility for adaptation down to local governments and to private actors.