ACCESS Seminar: Polycentric governance of climate-induced relocation: The experience of three U.S. communities

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 U.S., 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. Through the example of three U.S. communities that have already begun the process of relocation, we document the organizations involved and the legal authorities relied upon. Next, we leverage the Institutional Grammar to document the rules governing how identified organizations interact. In doing so, we provide insight into methods for institutional analysis—semi-automated analysis of institutional grammar in a large corpus of text using open-source software—contributing to an even wider realm of policy scholarship.

Biography:

Professor Christopher Galik is Director of the Sustainable Futures Initiative at North Carolina State University, where is he with the Department of Public Administration in the School of Public and International Affairs. He works at the intersection of public policy, economics, and technology, with an emphasis on energy and environmental governance. Christopher's work draws on a range of methods grounded in a variety of disciplines to explore complex environmental policy problems and their potential solutions. His recent work appears in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Policy & Politics, EIST, Energy Policy and Global Environmental Change.