There is an urgent need for efforts linking disaster risk reduction (DRR), mitigation, and climate change adaptation at the local level. In many places, an enormous amount of damage interrupts normal life and inflicts huge economic losses. Critical infrastructure investment and maintenance are essential to the normal functioning of society, achieving development goals, minimizing risks of multiple hazards, and reducing the negative impacts of climate change. However, for many communities, the basic provision and maintenance of infrastructure are often inadequate or missing.
Local governments play a key role in creating and maintaining public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, drinking water, stormwater, and sewage systems through their decisions. These decisions are configured by complex situations—e.g., biophysical, social, economic, and institutional settings—that give rise to uncertainties, incentives, and opportunity costs. For instance, local governments may struggle to provide infrastructure due to a host of factors, including weak institutions.
The available literature on local government adaptation and infrastructure proposes that autonomy, capacities, and leadership are important ingredients of local government performance, but it lacks an explicit discussion of how these drivers translate into local government decisions and outcomes, and why they sometimes do not emerge at all. To address this research gap, the project aims to explain under what institutional conditions local governments are more likely to adapt through critical infrastructure investment as well as other actions. The project proposes institutional hypotheses around the moderation effects of municipal organizational arrangements and governance interactions on the relationships between drivers (autonomy, capacities, leadership) and barriers (inequalities) on one side, and local government decisions on the other side.
The research test these hypotheses using a panel database with unique over-time observations in representative local government territories in Chile for the period 2009-2024, and qualitative (e.g., configurational) comparative analysis of a subsample of selected cases. The quantitative longitudinal analysis and the comparative qualitative analysis (mixed methods) allow the project to produce new knowledge on propitious institutional conditions to improve local government adaptive capacity.
The research aims to improve on both factual and methodological research gaps. Regarding the factual, there is still insufficient evidence and knowledge about the motivations and institutional conditions under which local governments are more likely to invest in infrastructure. Furthermore, most of the existing literature analyzes or compares cases of local governments often already committed to the emerging policy domain of adaptation in high-income countries. More attention should be given to the relatively unexplored topic of motivations and institutional settings shaping decisions and outcomes in typical municipalities of medium and low-income countries (committed or not to climate change adaptation), like in Chile. Methodologically, most studies rely predominantly on case and cross-sectional analysis with a low number of observations, without analyzing over-time dynamics and institutional change effects. Hence, many ideas remain untested.
The use of longitudinal data analysis allows the project to do two novel things: (1) test hypotheses about the moderating effects of institutional arrangements through dynamic analysis, and (2) produce knowledge about the adaptive nature of institutions regarding environmental change, which is difficult to accomplish effectively without reliable longitudinal data analysis.
The project contributes with evidence-based knowledge to the academic community through the presentation of results in seminars and workshops, the production of research articles to be submitted to top peer-reviewed journals (WOS), and the availability (access) of a unique database for comparative cross-regional analysis. The project generates benefits to local decision-makers as well as practitioners in Chile through the availability of data they currently lack, workshops, and advice for the application of institutional assessments (details available at Activities). By building on the research team's current engagement and repeated interactions with governance actors, the knowledge generated by the project has the potential to inform local policy decisions to usher in more effective adaptation. The project benefit undergraduate and graduate students through training and participation in research tasks, and the preparation of theses (details available at Theses).