Decoding climate adaptation governance: A sociotechnical perspective of U.S. airports

Inadequate governance is considered a major barrier for implementing policy, particularly those concerning global and complex challenges such as climate change adaptation. Literature in adaptation policy point to the lack of methods that monitor and assess how decision-making takes place and by whom. Based on a review of over 200 policy documents, this article benchmarks for the first time, the current airport climate adaptation regime in the United States and applies a sociotechnical system framework to scrutinize institutional capacity to address climate change impacts. An innovative policy review system is designed to decode how airport policies create conditions to use climate data as decision-relevant information and produce adaptation actions. Potential climate-cognizant policies are identified and characterized based on their target, timescale, and governance mode. Review results show that the assumption of climate stationarity is widespread. However, there is high potential for technical and, especially, organizational airport policies to incorporate climate science and adaptation pathways. Results also uncover governance barriers related to institutional path-dependence that include: (1) conflicting rationales between adaptation and reliability values, and (2) overpowering technical policies and market governance. These barriers perpetuate scale-mismatch between airport policies and expected impacts from climate change. Finally, we highlight the latent capacity for collaborative governance to advance adaptation regimes in airports and other multiscalar complex infrastructure systems. Our proposed methods and review results identify pathways to enhance institutional capacity for designing and operationalizing transformative adaptation policies.