July 2022
Daniel Henstra
Despite global progress on the adoption of national adaptation policies over the past decade, there has been a widespread implementation deficit, whereby most countries have had difficulty in translating aspirations into concrete adaptation initiatives. Two common challenges governments have faced at the implementation stage are (1) coordinating adaptation policies horizontally across departments and agencies and (2) integrating adaptation objectives into government functions, which is typically referred to as “mainstreaming”. This paper identifies promising mechanisms to coordinate adaptation within governments and to embed adaptation objectives into public decisions and policies.