Institutional Pathways to Conflict and Collaboration in Local Climate Adaptation: Evidence from a Qualitative Comparative Analysis

This study advances an institutional perspective on climate-security dynamics by examining how climate action can foster conflict or collaboration under different governance settings. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, local adaptation is conceptualized as an “action arena” where communities and organizations negotiate responses to climate threats within institutional constraints. Fieldwork was conducted across 14 climate-affected communities in Kenya, Senegal, Zambia, Guatemala, and the Philippines. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 31 action arenas assessed how combinations of five institutional conditions shape conflict and collaboration: nested institutions, resource tenure clarity, legitimacy, capacity, and multiplicity. Results show that no institutional condition consistently prevents conflict across contexts. Instead, collaboration and conflict emerge through multiple institutional pathways. Institutional legitimacy was found to be a central factor, being present across all collaborative pathways and absent from all conflict pathways. The findings further show that the effects of institutional capacity, tenure arrangements, nested governance, and institutional multiplicity depend on the broader institutional configurations in which they operate. These results highlight the importance of conjunctural causation in climate-security dynamics and suggest that conflict-sensitive adaptation requires attention to how institutional conditions interact, rather than focusing on individual governance characteristics in isolation.