An Analysis of Institutional Capacity for Climate Change Adaptation

The municipalities of Denmark are supposed to prepare climate change adaption (CCA) plans by the year 2013. Municipalities are co-operating with utility companies for adaptation tasks which is a new sort of planning approach. Besides, several utility companies are merged now and formed one company like HOFOR (Metropolitan supply company). The project is interesting because new governance forms due to the corporatization of the utilities. The paper is based on the question ´How do different municipalities in HOFOR develop their plans to implement climate change adaptation?´ Besides, the approaches that municipalities follow for climate change adaptation are identified. Moreover the paper investigates how the municipalities work with their neighbour municipalities, utility companies, citizens and other stakeholders for handling rainwater and wastewater. Municipalities face some challenges due to the presence of different barriers (legislative, financial and technical) which hinder to develop institutional capacity. Therefore, the paper finds out both enabling and constraining factors for building institutional capacity regarding climate change adaptation.