Canada’s Regional Adaptation Collaboratives and adaptation platform: The importance of scaling up and scaling down climate change governance experiments

Policy experiments have often been touted as valuable mechanisms for ensuring sustainability transitions and climate change adaptation. However problems exist both in the definition of ‘experiments’, and in their design and realization. While valuable, most experiments examined in the literature to date have been small-scale micro-level deployments or evaluations of policy tools in which the most problematic element revolves around their ‘‘scaling-up” or diffusion. The literature on the subject has generally neglected the problems and issues related to another class of experiments in which macro or mesolevel initiatives are ‘scaled-down’ to the micro-level. This paper examines a recent effort of this kind in Canada involving the creation of Regional Adaptation Collaboratives (RACs) across the country whose main purpose is to push national level initiatives down to the regions and localities. As the discussion shows, this top-down process has its own dynamics distinct from those involved in ‘scaling up’ and should be examined as a separate category of policy experiments in its own right. 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Practical implications Policy experimentation is becoming an important and necessary approach to developing innovative climate change adaptation policies. Such experiments come in a variety of forms but are potentially useful procedural policy tools for governments with limited policy capacities facing an increasingly complex policy making environment. They can provide an ex-ante evaluation, promote learning outcomes, and provide timely policy relevant information. In the absence of policy experimentation, policy managers and practitioners face the possibility of designing poorly designed large-scale programs or stuck with the status quo. One type of policy experiment is a procedural tool that seeks to change the policy process. Procedural policy tools are in contrast to substantive policy instruments (regulations, subsidies etc.). Typically, policy experiments have been ‘‘scaled up”, that is, from a micro-level pilot study, and if successful may be applied at a macro-level policy level. The policy experimentation literature has generally neglected the importance of ‘‘scaled down” experiments where broad politically approved on-going initiatives are applied to concrete issues. Scaling down is closely related to concerns with climate change adaptation practitioners who seek to ‘mainstream’ climate change into existing policies. Due to the larger governance implications of climate change adaptation, procedural based experiments also permit the meaningful participation of stakeholders in policy design. To examine scaling up and scaling down policy experimentation, a case study approach examined a multi-year Regional Adaptation Collaborative and National Adaptation Platform funded by the Government of Canada. Publically available government documents such as reports, assessments, evaluations and audits were used in the analysis. Examining the Canadian case study lead to the following practical implications: http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.cliser. 2016.11. 001 2405-8807/ 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: awellste@mtu.edu (A. Wellstead), howlett@sfu.edu (M. Howlett), sreeja.nair01@nus.edu. sg (S. Nair), jeremy.rayner@usask.ca (J. Rayner). Climate Services 4 (2016) 52–60