‘It Takes More to Get a Ship to Change Course’: Barriers for Organizational Learning and Local Climate Adaptation in Sweden

In working with local climate adaptation, questions are raised of how to increase the capacity for integrating climate considerations in planning and decision-making. As part of the institutional dimension of adaptive capacity, how to foster processes of learning and reflexivity among different administrative units and actors is particularly essential. The aim of this paper is to analyse how the call for systematic organizational learning is manifested in local climate adaptation in two Swedish municipalities, illustrating what forms of learning occur and what learning challenges are identified. Despite the distinct and often contrasting approaches to climate adaptation adopted in the two municipalities—reflecting a variety of learning approaches—there are striking similarities in terms of difficulties in moving beyond the specialized few and reaching general acceptability as well as in the inability to mediate tensions between local sector interests, values and priorities and thus bringing about reflexive learning through experience. The paper shows that the cross-cutting nature of climate change needs to be further acknowledged in practice, including to what extent learning takes place among a specialized few key actors or as part of a systematic and cross-sectoral organizational mainstreaming as well as to what extent learning ‘on paper’ is actually embraced as ‘learning in use’ in concrete working practices.