Alternative reactions to climate change: construct dikes or erect windmills? A synthesis of Cultural Theory and New Institutional Economics perspectives.

Climate change affects the entire globe. However, its effects are influenced by local geographic conditions and unevenly spread social adaptation capacities. Different levels of social vulnerability can be observed which are explained by distinct levels of wealth – so the general explanation goes. Such correlations cannot be neglected and are quite trivial: assuming similar geographical conditions, The Netherlands are better prepared to raise dikes against flooding than Bangladesh. But what about different coping capacities occurring despite of comparable levels of wealth? Why is it that the Mississippi delta was devastated by hurricane Katrina whereas the RhineMeuse delta has remained almost unaffected up to now? What accounts for the fact that Texas, not really renowned for caring much for environmental niceties, has set up more windmills than California and is close to outpacing Denmark and Germany? How come that Texas nevertheless rejects any environmental political guidelines from Washington? Our analysis will shed some light on the question of how different approaches and coping capacities with regard to climate change can be explained. Our analysis will focus on the intricate interaction of ideology, institutions and technology (cf. figure 1). By taking these analytical pillars as vantage points for our analysis, we refer to arguments presented by Schwarz and Thompson (1990), Mamadouh (1999), and Dryzek (2008), who claim a correlation between cultural frames, socio-economic institutions and environmental politics. We will try to elaborate and systematize these arguments and apply them to strategies laid out to primarily cope with climate change.