Policy integration of climate change adaptation in Central America: A review for development, land-use planning, and risk management

Abstract

Central American countries have been described as highly exposed to the negative effects of climate change (CC). Policies dedicated to CC and climate policy integration—mainstreaming—into sectoral policies have been considered key strategies. Previous research has documented the progress made in this region regarding dedicated policies, but regarding policy integration, information is limited or nonexistent. This article aims to address this gap by studying the level of integration of climate-change adaptation considerations into three prioritized sectors—general development planning, risk management, and land-use planning—by applying three criteria for policy integration—inclusion, consistency, and weighting. The results show a progressive trend to integrate adaptation into the policy outputs of the three sectors in all countries. Still, the operational level of instruments in some cases fails to fulfill the mandates to mainstream climate adaptation, and consistency is limited. These failures are indicators of lower levels of organizational maturity, which has also been detected in other developing countries and is connected to conflict and tradeoff avoidance behaviors as a filtering strategy to ensure progress at the cost of leaving key issues outside the mainstreaming process.