Policy Capacity and the Ability to Adapt to Climate Change: Canadian and U.S. Case Studies Jonathan Craft Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Michael Howlett Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Abstract This special issue contributes to extant empirical scholarship assessing governmental capacity to meet significant policy challenges, in this case those related to climate change adaptation. The study includes detailed examination of five policy sectors—finance, infrastructure, energy, forestry, and transportation—in two countries, Canada and the United States—in order to determine what kinds of governance arrangements and analytical capacities exist in this area, how they are changing (if at all), and how they interrelate with the status and evolution of climate change outcomes in each sector. The articles provide a comprehensive sampling of policy network structure and behavior, organizational mandates and resources, and actual job duties and training of policy actors across these sectors at both the federal and subnational level of government. KEY WORDS: policy capacity, climate change, climate change adaptation, comparative public policy, policy networks, organizational mandates, policy work Introduction: Shifts in Climate Change Policy Mandates and Their Evaluation As governments shift from climate change mitigation efforts to approaches aimed at adaptation, the policy design and implementation challenges they face also change. That is, as they shift from the largely incremental changes to the status quo associated with mitigation efforts to grappling with the major socioeconomic, politi- cal, and technological challenges related to climate change adaptation, they must deploy capacity and organize responses accordingly (Lemmen, Warren, Lacroix, & Bush, 2008; Swart et al., 2009). This special issue contributes to empirical scholar- ship assessing governmental capacity to meet such challenges. The study includes detailed examination of five policy sectors—finance, infra- structure, energy, forestry, and transportation—in the United States and Canada. It examines what kinds of governance arrangements and analytical capacities exist in each sector, how they are changing (if at all); and how they interrelate with the status and evolution of climate change policy-making processes and outcomes in each sector. Both countries are laggards in the realm of climate change innovation at the national and international levels, but have developed some new initiatives and plans at the subnational level. The essays and methods developed in this issue help to understand why this is the case, and thus are of use in helping to understand broad cross-national climate change policy dynamics. The cases are apt, given the multilevel governance structures in which climate change adaptation efforts occur. In each country (Dickinson & Burton, 2011; Rabe, 2007; Selin & VanDeveer, 2011), 1 Review of Policy Research, Volume 30, Number 1 (2013) 10.1111/ropr.12000 © 2013 by The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.