Social, Ecological, and Technological Strategies for Climate Adaptation

Resilient cities are able to persist, grow, and even transformwhile keeping their essential identities in the face of external forces like climate change, which threatens lives, livelihoods, and the structures and processes of the urban environment (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, How to make cities more resilient: a handbook for local government leaders. Switzerland, Geneva, 2017). Scenario development is a novel approach to visioning resilient futures for cities. As an instrument for synthesizing data and envisioning urban futures, scenarios combine diverse datasets such as biophysical models, stakeholder perspectives, and demographic information (Carpenter et al. Ecol Soc 20:10, 2015). As a tool to envision alternative futures, participatory scenario development explores, identifies, and evaluates potential outcomes and tradeoffs associated with the management of social–ecological change, incorporating multiple stakeholder’s collaborative subjectivity (Galafassi et al. Ecol Soc 22:2, 2017). Understanding the current landscape of city planning and governance approaches is important in developing city-specific scenarios. In particular, assessing municipal planning strategies through the lens of interactive social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) provides useful insight into the dynamics and interrelationships of these coupled systems (da Silva et al. Sustain Dev 4(2):125–145, 2012). An assessment of existing municipal strategies can also be used to inform future adaptation scenarios and strategic plans addressing extremeweather events.With the scenario development process guiding stakeholders in generating goals and visions through participatoryworkshops, the content analysis Y. Kim (B) · S. Markolf Julia Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: yeowon.kim@asu.edu L. M. Mannetti · D. M. Iwaniec Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Urban Studies Institute, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA N. B. Grimm School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA M. Berbés-Blázquez School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA © This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply 2021 Z. A. Hamstead et al. (eds.), Resilient Urban Futures, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63131-4_3 29

of governance planning documents from the SETS perspective provides key insight on specific strategies that have been considered (or overlooked) in cities. In this chapter, we (a) demonstrate an approach to examine how cities define and prioritize climate adaptation strategies in their governance planning documents, (b) examine how governance strategies address current and future climate vulnerabilities as exemplified by nine cities in North and Latin America where we conducted a content analysis of municipal planning documents, and (c) suggest a codebook to explore the diverse SETS strategies proposed to address climate challenges-specifically related to extreme weather events such as heat, drought, and flooding.

Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) Framework
Envisioning how we transform our cities into places and communities that are resilient is an emerging urban challenge that requires an approach integrating diverse knowledge, experience, and perspectives (Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2017). Cities are SETS, and so are parts of cities like neighborhoods, parks, and various types of infrastructure. The SETS perspective is an important aspect of envisioning urban futures because cities are considered as systems, meaning we cannot consider parts of cities-institutions, ecosystems, built environment, and communities-in isolation since they interact to form the whole. In SETS, social dimensions include social-political-cultural-economic dynamics of a city, including both the decision-making actors and their actions. Ecological dimensions include the biophysical elements of non-human nature, with their associated processes, that are part of the fabric of cities-for example, tree growth or soil formation. Technological dimensions include the built components and associated processes of urban systems, for example, roads or public transportation networks, buildings, and the knowledge embodied in technologies (Markolf et al. 2018). Envisioning cities from a SETS perspective raises valuable governance questions, such as the type of institutions and knowledge needed, as well as which people are affected by infrastructure changes (Kim et al. 2019). How can services provided by natural ecosystems be integrated into the built environment? How can technological advances be used to impart flexibility or redundancy to infrastructure? The SETS approach demands that such questions-reflecting the three SETS dimensions-be answered to build resilience and support sustainable pathways.
The SETS framework for climate adaptation is a pragmatic approach that reflects an increasing recognition of the role that built and technological infrastructure play in mediating the relationships among human activities and ecosystem processes (Grimm et al. 2015;McPhearson et al. 2016). The SETS framework is fundamental to climate adaptation plans because it helps to clarify how interactions among the social-political-cultural-economic (S) and the biophysical (E) domains are mediated through infrastructure (T). Key SETS components to consider encompass diverse social, ecological, and technological features, as well as where these intersect, since these three dimensions interact with each other in supporting urban pathways to resilient futures. Examples include social-ecological considerations in land use changes, ecological effects of biophilia, or the need for more green spaces on society, and technological-social innovation for mobility or communication (Table 3.1).

Content Analysis of Municipal Planning Documents and Governance Strategies in SETS
In the face of the growing occurrence of weather extremes, climate adaptation plans are essential governance tools at regional, city, and local levels. Though such plans have been extensively developed at national and international levels, local governments have a vital role in implementing municipal-level climate adaptation strategies that are retrofit to various governance scales, regional climatic characteristics, and urban SETS. In the last two decades, city governments have been developing planning documents such as comprehensive municipal plans, disaster preparedness plans, climate action plans, and sustainability plans meant to advance urban resilience by implementing climate adaptation strategies at local levels (Reckien et al. 2018). City plans and city planning processes embody the goals and actions that cities seek to advance for urban resilience (Bulkeley 2010). Municipal governance is often shaped by various forms of interacting institutions, including governing agencies, policies, formal and informal codes, local knowledge systems, practitioners, public officials, and communities (Folke et al. 2005;Araos et al. 2016;Feagan et al. 2019). City plans express goals that are shaped by the various institutions, as well as guide interactions among institutions to achieve goals, demonstrate suitable governance strategies, and envision achievable expectations and outcomes of these strategies (Carmin et al. 2012). As cities continue to lead urban resilience planning, we analyze municipal planning documents to examine how urban governance structures (with diverse socio-political-cultural and biophysical contexts) plan for climate change. Analyzing plans help us understand what strategies are effective and practical, and how well adaptation strategies are integrated in local governance. As such, governance planning documents provide insight into how cities are framing urban resilience, yet there are few mechanisms to effectively and efficiently highlight the suite of SETS climate adaptation strategies that cities are considering. In the following sections, we provide four essential steps for analyzing governance strategies from municipal planning documents by using the SETS framework in order to support an effective scenario-development process for visioning resilient urban futures.

Selecting Municipal Planning Documents
The first step is to choose appropriate documents for analysis. Since our focus is municipal governance strategies for climate change adaptation, the pool of potential documents for analysis is limited to plans that are drafted and published by the city, local, and regional governments, and by local non-governmental organizations. Once the potential documents are identified in a city, three to five dominant governance documents are selected for analysis based on the following criteria.
• Must be an overarching planning document (e.g., General Plans, Comprehensive Plans, Sustainability/Resilience Plans, Climate Action Plans, Common Plans) • Must be less than five years old, with exceptions if the total number of available documents for analysis in a city is less than three • Must be relevant to climate change, flooding/heat/drought adaptation, resilience, or sustainability • If more than five documents are available that fit the above criteria, only those salient to climate change adaptation, sustainability, or resilience are selected. If the document is titled with climate action, sustainability, or resilience, it may be prioritized, otherwise the relevance may be determined by how comprehensively the document focuses on strategic planning for mitigation of climatic risks or adaptation to environmental changes (e.g., comprehensive municipal plans, hazard mitigation plans, disaster preparedness management plans, stormwater plans) • Match the plans to the spatial scale under consideration (e.g., neighborhood, city-wide, regional, national).
We recommend consultation and validation with city practitioners regarding the priority and relevance of documents to finalize the selection. Using the above section criteria, 30 planning documents from across the UREx SRN cities were selected for analysis. These include a diversity of document types relevant to climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability. The selected documents were published between 2010 and 2015 at the municipal, regional, and state levels (Table 3.2).

Extracting Governance Strategies
From the selection of municipal plans in each city, governance strategies are extracted by capturing exact quotes from documents. The extraction should focus primarily on quotes that describe implementation strategies relating to extreme weather events (namely flooding, extreme heat, and drought), actions, or approaches to adapt to climate change or extreme events in general, and governance mechanisms to mitigate, adapt, or respond to events related to climate change. Examples of strategies extracted from across the UREx SRN cities are presented in Table 3.3.

Labeling Strategies with Levers and Exogenous Drivers
After strategies are extracted, the individual strategies are first qualitatively coded for the type of climatic drivers being addressed (i.e., exogenous drivers) and the type of policy instruments being implemented (i.e., levers) (Lempert et al. 2003;Wiek and Iwaniec 2014;Iwaniec et al. 2020). In our case, climatic drivers refer to extreme weather events that impact cities, such as floods (urban, coastal, riverine, or nonspecific), extreme heat, drought, and non-specific hazards. Policy instruments are governance mechanisms that may be manipulated to mitigate or respond to the impact of these drivers. Examples include research and plan development, intergovernmental coordination, maintenance of built infrastructure, economic incentives, and education and outreach.

The SETS Codebook
We developed the SETS codebook that helps us identify SETS components of governance strategies based on Denton et al.  (Table 3.4) is developed in an inductive process by encompassing a pool of sample strategies and incorporating previous studies on systems governance analysis. We propose this codebook for analyzing governance strategies to be qualitatively coded by their contents and evaluated by the interaction of social, ecological, and technological domains. As a non-scale, system-level, bridging framework, this coding scheme allows cities and their stakeholders to explore SETS interaction and adaptation strategies associated with them in city to regional-level governance data. In Table 3.5, we include selected examples of governance strategies that are analyzed by the proposed SETS codebook. The outcome of the analysis creates a comprehensive framework to assess climate change adaptation strategies based on their synergies, conflicts, and tradeoffs across SETS domains.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we present an approach to identify and analyze municipal governance strategies using a SETS framework for urban resilience framework. Assessing governance strategies using a SETS framework is particularly valuable in the scenariobased visioning process. SETS governance strategies help stakeholders understand current dynamics of urban systems and explore adaptation options prioritized at various governance scales, and are thus useful for visioning futures when provided to diverse stakeholders in the process of developing participatory scenarios. Analysis of governance strategies using a SETS framework can explain how cities currently address climate risks and existing system vulnerabilities through governance adaptation mechanisms. We are particularly interested in determining whether planning documents tend to prioritize a particular SETS domain over others (e.g., predominance of technological solutions), and if they adequately consider system relationships. Identifying SETS interactions in proposed and implemented municipal governance plans is an important step in bridging the gap between aspirations and   viable adaptation actions. Shaping climate adaptation goals and instigating governance strategies by integrating social, ecological, and technological domains in a systems perspective is essential for building urban resilience, and ultimately, for enabling transformation to sustainable pathways toward the resilient future. Table 3.5 Example of coded strategies using the SETS codebook. To maintain inter-coder reliability, multiple coders analyzed and reviewed each strategy following the suggested codebook in Table 3.4. Before analysis, selected coders were trained according to standardized coding protocol and the codebook to maintain coding coherency across various documents and among coders. SETS codes correspond to SETS components set out in Table 3  Marta Berbés-Blázquez is an Assistant Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation at Arizona State University. Her research considers the human dimensions of social-ecological transformations in rural and urban ecosystems with an emphasis on vulnerable populations. Her work is informed by resilience thinking and political ecology at a conceptual level, and it is practically oriented toward qualitative, participatory, and anticipatory research methods. Specific topics of expertise include power dynamics and access in ecosystem services, scenario planning, resource extraction, eco-health, climate change adaptation, and transformation. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.