Climate adaptation in the Anthropocene: Constructing and contesting urban risk regimes

The Anthropocene heralds a new era of heightened and unknown risks, particularly regarding the impacts of climate change. This article explores the initial phase of organizing for climate adaptation in Boston, Massachusetts, examining how multiple actors, including business, government, and community organization, are interacting as they attempt to comprehend, assess, and act on this issue. To understand this process of organizing, we develop the concept of ‘risk regime’ as a contingently stabilized system with governance, economic, and discursive dimensions. We draw from theories of risk, organizational resilience, and urban regimes and value regimes to develop the ‘risk regime’ framework, which provides a nuanced view of contestation, collaboration, and accommodation among actors with differential interests, knowledge, and influence on the process. We suggest how the character, evolution, and stabilization of the regime is influenced by competing imaginaries regarding, for example, the nature and manageability of risk, the need for radical change, and the role of markets versus regulations in addressing tensions between economic and sustainability goals. We demonstrate that the regime for adaptation has grown out of the organizational and discursive infrastructure for addressing climate mitigation, or carbon control, but that the unique character of adaptation presents different, and perhaps more difficult challenges.