Analyzing climate change adaptation policies in the context of the local state

As climate change becomes a more obvious existential threat to many communities, sharper tools are needed to analyze policymaking and especially the variations in effective adaptive planning. While policy creation, preparedness and disaster management are essentially local activities, much analysis simply focuses on cities and overlooks robust tools to understand what happens within communities of all types. This paper explores the local state, an analytical framework which can connect our understanding of state, market and civil society within communities below the level of the nation state. The local state concept is resurgent within the academic literature and this paper shows the potential of this analysis, drawing on empirical examples of climate change adaptation from Tucson AZ and New Orleans, coupled with broader discussion from several countries.