Climate change necessitates major changes in infrastructure siting, design, and operations. Successful adaptation of infrastructure management requires overcoming thorny institutional challenges including path dependency and isomorphic pressures that inhibit major shifts in norms and practices. Hazards have been posited as a potential trigger for changing long-standing institutions because they can upend stable system states. However, research on the ability of hazards to shift norms and practices is still nascent and focuses on rapid-onset disasters like floods, hurricanes, or fires.

This is a collaborative project between CEPB and the UC Davis World Food Center, and former WFC director Dr. Josette Lewis. 

This project describes and summarizes California's adoption of "climate smart agriculture" (CSA) policies and programs. We illustrate how synergies and trade-offs are addressed in a policy framework that spans regulatory measures, incentive programs, research, and technological development, that is both climate specific and arising from other simultaneous environmental and economic priorities.

This project investigates the collaborative governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project seeks to identify, map and understand the governance, ecological and infrastructural interdependencies existing in the Bay Area insofar as climate adaptation to sea level rise is concerned. The project is a joint effort with University of California Berkeley Dept of Engineering and New York University Abu Dhabi Engineering Division. It is financed by a NSF Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) grant.

The project seeks to improve understanding of the role of institutions in developing adaptive capacity to the near-term effects of climate change in the Lake Victoria region of East Africa. Key adaptive capacity issues in the Lake Victoria region include disruptions to agricultural productivity, altered flood regimes, threats to the viability of fisheries, and shifts in plant and animal habitat suitability. Within the past few decades, numerous collaborative institutions have emerged to help address these adaptive capacity issues.

This research analyzes the interaction among policy actors as they seek solutions to to complex policy problems in multiple "governance" games. We study the local ecology of games in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta (CA), Tampa Bay (FL), and the Parana Delta of Argentina. The research involves surveys of policy stakeholders and statistical models of policy networks. We hope to understand the factors associated with cooperation, adaptive capacity, and resilience in these complex systems.

This project focuses on the evolution of stakeholder cooperation in the context of collaborative environmental policy in several different settings. Collaborative policy settings studied included the National Estuary Program, Integrated Regional Water Management, and regional land-use and transportation planning.