Previous scholarship broadly emphasizes weather disasters as threshold events to instigate climate adaptation. This study goes beyond the disaster-adaptation nexus by investigating its institutional conditionality. Drawing on the theory of institutional isomorphism, we examine how disasters interact with three isomorphic institutions - coercive, mimetic and normative - to influence cities' adaptation to climate change. Using survey data on California cities in 2013-2014, 2017 and 2018, the findings suggest that cities predominantly take reactive and top-town approaches to climate adaptation, with coercive isomorphism being the main driver of their adaptation efforts. Meanwhile, the three isomorphic forces differentially condition the impacts of disasters on adaptation: both coercive and mimetic pressures produce a diminishing marginal effect as the frequency of disasters surpasses a certain threshold, whereas normative pressure exhibits a positive and reinforcing marginal effect as disaster exposure goes up. We conclude with practical implications associated with the boundary conditions of disaster-driven adaptation, adaptation policy design as well as entry points to bottom-up adaptation initiatives.
Zhang, FX
Disaster-driven climate adaptation: bringing institutions in
Urban Climate