Institutional Foundations of Adaptive Planning: Exploration of Flood Planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA

TL;DR

This study investigates how traditional planning institutions influence adaptive flood planning in Texas, revealing that current hazard plans and discussions lack adaptive approaches despite the need for flexibility under climate change uncertainties.

Contribution

It examines the role of existing planning institutions in supporting adaptive flood planning and uses NLP to analyze institutional documents and discussions.

Findings

Hazard plans largely lack adaptive strategies.

Regional flood planning discussions do not emphasize adaptability.

Institutional outputs show limited support for adaptive planning.

Abstract

Adaptive planning is ideally suited for the deep uncertainties presented by climate change. While there is a robust scholarship on the theory and methods of adaptive planning, this has largely neglected how adaptive planning is affected by existing planning institutions and how to move forward within the constraints of traditional planning organizations. This study asks: How do existing traditional planning institutions support adaptive planning? We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States. We draw on county hazard plan and regional flood plan documents as well as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings to explore the emergent topics of these institutional outputs. Using Natural Language Processing to analyze this large amount of text, we find that hazard plans and discussions developing these plans are largely lacking an adaptive approach.