On October 2nd and 3rd 2020, Storm Alex violently hit Southeast France. It resulted in approximately one billion euros of damage, making it the most destructive event in metropolitan France since WWII. Building on US-focused scholarship on State-reinforced adaptive governance (AG), this work treats the event as an emergence frontier and analyzes how formal authorities responded to this climate catastrophe. More specifically it examines authorities’ risk management and urban planning efforts at this emergence frontier to determine the extent to which they successfully promoted State-reinforced AG and adaptation to climate change in their responses to the storm. To evaluate this, the paper mobilizes the analytical framework designed by DeCaro et al. (2017), a rubric of legal and institutional design principles whose implementation has been shown to facilitate the development of State-reinforced AG. More specifically, with these principles, it mobilized a mix-methodology to assess if and how administrative laws and central authorities supported lower levels of governance and promoted the emergence of AG in the context of a new polycentric order. This work shows that responses to Storm Alex led to the emergence of State-reinforced AG in the areas of risk management and urban planning. The case study illustrates that combining the analysis of legal and institutional design principles is both synergistic and makes a reliable indicator for the emergence of AG. In addition, this study contributes to the growing literature on State-reinforced AG by presenting a case study from France, a country with historically highly centralized governance system. This work also engages with criticisms of AG by providing a contextualized analysis and an in-depth and complex examination of the roles played by agents of change in shaping the emergence of AG.
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