The Paradox of Public Trust Shaping Local Climate Change Adaptation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper explores actions of three small cities in Pennsylvania to maintain public trust and adapt water management to climate change. The paper exposes how the need to maintain trust and be responsive to constituent priorities can limit local government adaptation when there is not strong public support for climate change adaptation. The authors coin this concept as the “paradox of public trust”. Another way to view this challenge is competing priorities of good governance. On the one hand, good government should take actions to protect the welfare and safety of their constituents i.e. adapt to climate change. On the other hand, good government should be responsive to their constituents. When constituents do not perceive or support action to address a threat like climate change that poses true risks to their welfare, it poses a conundrum for local government. The three municipalities in this study were taking actions to “adapt” to the extent that their constituents supported by promoting water conservation, investing in increased water supply, and diversifying water sources. But officials did not view these actions as “adaptation” and had little appetite for taking bolder action to prepare for climate change. Overall, the paper is well written and explores an interesting topic for climate change governance.

One area that I believe could be improved is the discussion of public perception and partisan divide on climate change (line 110-131). While it is true that climate change is politically contentious, more and more Americans believe climate change is happening and support climate action. There are also differences in support for mitigation and adaptation, which tends to be more politically palatable. I would suggest revising this paragraph to better reflect current trends in public opinion.

It may also be helpful to provide more context on the public opinion on climate change in the three communities you studied. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication provides county level public opinion data on climate change: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/

Similarly, I would like more context on the impacts of climate change on water management three communities face. Is this region projected to experience more extreme rainfall? Greater water scarcity? What are the implications of these changes on water management? Are they already experiencing impacts of climate change? Your description does not need to be long, but without this it is difficult to judge whether municipal actions are sufficient.

It may also be helpful to provide some background on the type of adaptation actions that may be considered for these impacts. As I understand it, you developed your code for actions based on your document review. There are many additional actions that may be taken that are not considered by any of the communities.

In the methods, you mention that you are broadly interested in water management. Yet, the results seem to focus primarily on water supply. Did you include flood mitigation and water quality in your search for actions and interviews? It would be helpful to further clarify what falls into “water management.”

Similarly, the community sustainability code seems to capture actions that are not water or adaptation related. For example, the use of renewable energy in Carlisle is not clearly tied to the topics of interest. I would suggest providing more description of the sustainability code in the methods and in the results make a stronger case for why these types of actions are important in your assessment of adaptation in water management and public trust.

Lastly, careful proofreading is needed. There are a few sentences that are confusing. For example, “Three municipalities in Central Pennsylvania were examined to gain insight into how those working in local governments negotiate the perceived impact that their decisions about climate change adaptation might have on residents.” Perhaps this should read, “We examined three municipalities in central Pennsylvania to gain insight into how local government officials negotiate the need and public support for climate change adaptation.” Generally, deleting unnecessary words would improve clarity.

Author Response

Responses are provided in the attached document. Thank you for your continued attention to our paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The article entitled, “The paradox of public trust shaping local climate change adaptation,” examines the links between how local governments work to secure public trust and the local undertaking of climate adaptation actions (overtly, or covertly). The authors analyze local government documents and conduct interviews in three Pennsylvania municipalities to examine what potential actions taken in the water sector could be considered consistent with climate change adaptation, as well as those action designed to shore up public trust. The authors present this data to render a surprising conclusion that local government efforts to uphold public trust may be repressing willingness to claim credit for pursuing climate change adaptation. 

I very much enjoyed reading this article (well written!), finding its aim compelling. To the extent it may be considered valid, their conclusion about the paradox of trust would contribute significant insight to the literature on climate change adaptation implementation.

However, the authors do not yet have me convinced, based on their methods and data, of their claimed linkage between government actions to uphold public trust actions and their explicit disregard for climate change adaptation. They claim to have found a “complex relationship” between the two, but this article does not validate that relationship in the data presented  nor does the reader gain a better understanding of its complexity.

I encourage the authors to strengthen the clarity of their methods and the depth of their results in analysis. I have some suggestions about how they might do this in the following four major comments:

1. It is unclear whether the coding related to building and maintaining public trust was a secondary coding applied to existing instances where adaptive measures were identified, or if the trust coding was an entirely separate primary coding exercise. If the former, the authors should specify and it would help to strengthen their claim about the linkage between trust building and adaptation. If the latter, then the authors need to provide more substantial evidence of linkages between the two.

2. The coding categories are poorly defined and hard to connect with the meaningfulness of trust. I do not understand what “assured reliance related to utility provision and statute compliance means” (line 179) and why/how that single theme is broken into three separate line items in table 1. How are those different themes distinguished in the numerical coding when quantitatively described as a single code in the text? More basically, what does that code mean? What does the unit of analysis of “action” mean, such that multiple actions around the same theme could be counted discretely? How did the authors distinguish between actions of a similar theme within a borough when coding?

3. The description of trust building actions in the case study subsections are interesting, but those sections do not make clear the distinction between the coding for trust building and the coding for adaptation actions. For example beginning in line 343, a description of what Carlisle did for community sustainability (as a trust building theme) is described as a trust building action but no explicit mention is made to results from the adaptation action coding. This is why I wonder if the trust coding was applied on top of the adaptation action coding, and if that is true then that methodology needs to be more clear.

4. In each of the case studies, the data that conveys a linkage between trust building actions and a reluctance to claim credit for adaptation is not clearly demonstrated. The interview comments that are provided seem to clearly suggest reasons of political stigma for driving this reluctance. I do think it is interesting if the authors can unpack that through the “paradox of trust” lens, but as currently written I don’t think they do that well enough to justify their conclusions.

For all the issues cited in the four above remarks, a synthesis comment I’ll make is that as of yet, I also think the authors have not lived up to their claim to provide a “thick description” noted in the abstract and in the methods. However, I am hopeful that by clarifying their methods and providing more evidence to back up their argument, they will be able to deliver a stronger paper.

I also have some minor comments:

Line 55 - I would argue that it’s more than a “perception” that attention should be paid to local climate adaptation. It’s a concreted area of research well underway. 

Line 65. At the start of section 2, before launching into background of trust, it might be helpful to have a transition that explains to the reader why unpacking the concept of trust is important to interpreting the results and conclusions of the paper. As written, section 2 reads a bit disconnected from the paper.

Line 117. “trust and risk perceptions give rise to more ameliorative actions.” I think that making such a bold claim, even with a citation, requires a bit more unpacking for readers to understand what you mean and its’ validity. As written this is both confusion and not well enough substantiated. 

Line 120. Not familiar with meaning of affective in context of “affective political polarization”

Line 147-150. Minor formatting issues. 

155. Is thick description a methodological approach itself or the outcome of a strong qualitative research approach?

214. Coding for utility provision seems to imply that a city having a utility is represented as a coded action for building trust? If this is true then it seems like the codebook may need to be better explained in order to justify the conclusions. If I’m misunderstanding, then I would encourage the authors to make their coding themes more understandable. 

Author Response

Responses are provided in the attached document. Thank you for your continued attention to our paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx