Anticipating Climate Change Along the Land–Sea Continuum: Why Policy and Organisational Dynamics Matter

How the organisational dimension of public policy influences climate change anticipation is a critical, yet underexplored, question. This is especially so at the local scale where many climate‐related interests are brokered. In this article, we argue that any analysis of the influence of de‐centralised organisations on climate change anticipation must be carried out in conjunction with analysis of how climate change problems are being framed by local actors in the first place. We illustrate this with the case of the Charente River basin and its coastal zone in southwest France. We show how, during a European research project, coastal and rural stakeholders (public/private) re‐defined the implications of climate change for their numerous interdependencies over water (quality, quantity). Rather than continuing to respond to climate change effects through negative inter‐sector and inter‐spatial competitions and conflicts, they chose instead to re‐frame the problem as one of a shared vulnerability, symbolised by the notion of a ‘land–sea continuum’. However, when it came to governing economic activities from the perspective of the land–sea continuum, our research uncovered deep de‐centralised organisational shortcomings across several domains hindering the kind of policy transformation desired by stakeholders. Not due to an absence of ‘land–sea’ committees per se, limitations stemmed from their representational, jurisdictional and scalar practices. These treated the governance of land–sea interdependencies as a coordination, rather than political, problem, perpetuating coastal‐rural inequalities, and ultimately favouring ‘land’ over ‘sea’ interests. Focusing attention on organisational dynamics thus helps identify otherwise hidden impediments to transforming decision‐making anticipating climate change.