Up in the air: informing and imagining climate adaptation along the New Jersey shore
Creators: name: Eisenhauer, David C.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2019

description: In this dissertation, I examine the challenges posed by climate change to the New Jersey shore region as well as efforts to inform and support successful adaptation policies. The core argument of the dissertation is the region needs transformational change in the near term if a socially and ecologically vibrant future is to be achieved. Informing the design and supporting the implementation of sustainable transformational pathways requires engaging with the deeply entrenched cultural, economic, and political commitments that configure contemporary development within the New Jersey shore region. By drawing upon archival and historical research along with semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I demonstrate that historical and contemporary processes have contributed to material and imaginative path dependencies within the shore region that have led to governance and management prioritizing private property rights and economic growth over ecological and social sustainability. I argue that to support more just and sustainable pathways, practitioners working within the boundaries of science and policy must engage more with the political, imaginative, and normative dimensions of collective life in the New Jersey shore region. In making this case, the dissertation is divided into two main sections. In Section One, I trace the historical development, entrenchment, and extension of the prevailing sociotechnical imaginary guiding development in the New Jersey shore region. In particular, I highlight how racism, capitalism, politics, and technological innovation all intersected to produce the contemporary space of the region. In doing so, I elucidate how historical forces are still present in the New Jersey shore landscape in the form of material infrastructure, public policy, and cultural visions of desirable life. In Section Two, I examine how ongoing initiatives to inform the creation of successful climate change policies must grapple with myriad constraints—including the historical ones described in Section One but also emergent ones due to climate change. In light of the numerous constraints to effective adaptation, I develop a heuristic to differentiate and connect individual barriers in order to help distinguish which factors drive slow and ineffective policy responses. By identifying and addressing such constraints, I argue it is possible to foster cascading change towards more desirable social and ecological arrangements. Following this, I provide an in-depth examination of how one initiative to provide municipal government actors with tailored and usable climate information succeeded in getting climate change adaptation on the policy agenda. I highlight the crucial role that boundary objects played in not only supporting collaboration, but also convening the process, securing buy-in, and implementing policies. At the same time, while the examined effort did manage to get municipal government elected officials and staff to begin planning for sea level rise, coastal flooding, and powerful storms, it did not lead to the transformational change commensurate with the plausible impacts of climate change in the coming decades. Thus, more work needs to be done to support systemic change that targets the central constraints to sustainable adaptation. In the conclusion, I develop the concept of ‘imaginative fit and interplay’ to help guide collaborative knowledge production initiatives in producing transformative knowledge. I also discuss future research to building off these insights to support transformative change towards a more socially just and ecologically vibrant New Jersey shore region.