Who is responsible for addressing climate risks in coastal cities? Insights from a policy document analysis of Metro Manila

Metro Manila is the Philippines’ largest metropolitan region. It is highly urbanized, densely populated, and situated on the coast where it is highly exposed to natural disasters and rising sea levels. Therefore, a significant question for Metro Manila concerns how to adapt to such current and future climate hazards. To address this urgent need to adapt to climate change while simultaneously tackling pronounced urban and sustainable development challenges, a multitude of policy and planning documents have been formulated within the Philippines across varying scales. These documents represent a suitable means of analyzing the legal-institutional dimension of adaptation governance in Metro Manila. One pressing question in the field of adaptation governance, which remains understudied, is who is actually responsible for adaptation. Hence, this research aims to answer how, in the documents, roles and responsibilities for adaptation are divided amongst the different actors who are parties to the ‘social contract’ on adaptation. The research questions are as follows: 1) What is the discourse on roles and responsibilities in the policy and planning documents? 2) Which actors are described as being responsible for implementing adaptation strategies, and who should benefit from these actions? 3) Are these actors’ roles and responsibilities clearly defined in the documents, and which types of responsibilities are defined? A qualitative methodology was utilized to answer these questions. First, existing literature was reviewed to synthesize a framework for assessing different types of roles and responsibilities (such as financial, legal, and moral) as well as evaluation criteria (such as accountability, responsiveness, and transparency). Then, the framework was applied to 39 policy and planning documents from the national to the local level by means of a qualitative content analysis in MAXQDA. The findings show that responsibilities are more commonly referred to than roles, and that clearly defined responsibilities throughout the adaptation policy cycle are increasingly considered to be an important aspect for effective implementation. The documents vary in the extent to which they clearly define responsibilities for different actors, but the roles and responsibilities of governmental actors are defined most clearly. However, the adaptation stakeholder landscape is quite complex and stretches beyond governmental actors to incorporate academia, citizens, civil society and non-governmental organizations, international organizations and foreign actors, future generations, and the private sector. The latter is often called upon to aid the government in fulfilling financial responsibilities and infrastructure construction. Lastly, the analysis shows that cooperative and participatory processes, as mechanisms for influencing social contracts for adaptation, are playing progressively important roles. Future research will thus conduct interviews to explore how, in collaborative efforts and participatory processes, questions around social acceptability and political responsibilities are discussed and where the disparities lie between the legal-institutional responsibilities captured in the documents, and practiced and expected responsibilities. This is key for making some of the implicit developments more explicit in the timely discussion about who is responsible for doing what in adaptation, and which actors benefit or lose out.