Climate adaptation in practice: How mainstreaming strategies matter for policy integration

With some level of climate change now inevitable, climate policy around the world has evolved in recent decades to include adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most industrialized countries have formulated national adaptation strategies to meet this challenge. However, the implementation of on‐the‐ground measures is lagging. To analyze the implementation process and possible reasons for the implementation gap, we take a closer look at how the integration of adaptation goals into various sectoral policies—often called mainstreaming—has been handled on different administrative levels in Switzerland. Going beyond traditional compilations of barriers to climate change adaptation, we analyze the use of six different mainstreaming strategies across cases and levels and the reasons for their success or lack thereof. We find that different actors at all administrative levels have successfully employed programmatic mainstreaming in combination with inter‐organizational mainstreaming to foster horizontal cooperation. We call this strategy cooperative mainstreaming. Some pioneers even managed to channel their successes into advances in regulatory mainstreaming. However, the lack of systematic regulatory and directed mainstreaming on the national and cantonal levels largely limits adaptation actions on lower levels to those cases where the major impetus derives from extreme events or proactive individuals on the ground. We conclude that the adaptation implementation gap in Switzerland largely stems from the lack of political commitment to promoting local adaptation at the national and cantonal levels.