ABSTRACT Climate change has and will continue to have a profound effect on both individuals and the communities in which they reside. A pressing question is how communities forced to confront climate‐induced catastrophe—including both rapid and slow‐onset hazards—undertake the decision of how and when to relocate, particularly given the multiple scales at which decision‐making processes play out and the broadly felt social, economic, and environmental effects that arise from the resulting decisions. In the US, multiple communities have begun to face the challenge of relocation through the creation of formalized plans, plans that can themselves be used as windows into a complex and emergent governance process. But before the effectiveness of these processes in governing relocation can be assessed, we must first understand the structure under which relocation occurs. Through the example of three US communities that have already begun the process of relocation, we document the organizations involved and the policies and programs cited. Leveraging the Institutional Grammar, we next explore the institutional structure of the relocation process against theoretical expectations for polycentric governance. In doing so, we provide further examples of semi‐automated analysis of institutional grammar using open‐source software, contributing to an even wider realm of policy scholarship.
Galik et al. (Sun,) studied this question.