Institutional Foundations of Adaptive Planning: Exploration of Flood Planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA
This addresses the gap in understanding institutional barriers to adaptive planning for climate change adaptation, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific case.
The study examined how traditional planning institutions support adaptive planning for flood management in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and found that hazard plans and discussions largely lack an adaptive approach.
Adaptive planning is ideally suited for the deep uncertainties presented by climate change. While there is a robust scholarship on the theory and methods of adaptive planning, this has largely neglected how adaptive planning is affected by existing planning institutions and how to move forward within the constraints of traditional planning organizations. This study asks: How do existing traditional planning institutions support adaptive planning? We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States. We draw on county hazard plan and regional flood plan documents as well as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings to explore the emergent topics of these institutional outputs. Using Natural Language Processing to analyze this large amount of text, we find that hazard plans and discussions developing these plans are largely lacking an adaptive approach.