Completing the climate change adaptation planning cycle: monitoring and evaluation by local government in Australia

Local governments are at the forefront of climate change adaptation planning. Although there is significant research on adaptation planning processes, there is scant empirical evidence of how local governments are completing the adaptation planning cycle by monitoring or evaluating their efforts. This leads to a fundamental lack of understanding about what actions work, in which contexts, and why? This article explores the practice of monitoring and evaluation of adaptation by local government, drawing on data from a national survey of Australian local governments, enhanced by interviews with selected respondents. It finds that monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation is challenging for local governments. Monitoring efforts focus on tracking implementation of actions, and evaluation of adaptation plans and projects is rare. It argues that for effective adaptation planning and learning, greater attention needs to be paid to building evaluative capacity of local governments to complete the adaptation planning cycle.