Moving the needle on sea level rise policy: a case study from the state of Hawaiʻi

Abstract

What makes long-term policy issues rise to the legislative agenda in the state-level policymaking process? More specifically, why have sea level rise adaptation policies gained traction in some states but not others? The following paper presents a case study of the State of Hawai’i, which is critically vulnerable to sea level rise impacts. The study operationalizes the concept of policy traction or “issue salience” as the number of issue-related bills submitted to the state legislature in a given annual legislative session and finds a dramatic increase in the number of issue-related bills proposed in the Hawai’i State Legislature starting in 2018. What caused this abrupt rise in issue salience around the topic of sea level rise? The paper employes Kingdon’s classic multiple streams framework to analyze a convergence of three “streams” of activities (the problem recognition stream, the policy proposal stream, and the political stream) that created a “policy window” for the issue to gain traction. The study finds that, while all three streams contributed to opening the policy window, the problem recognition stream in particular played a key role in driving the uptick in sea level rise-related policy after 2018. For the problem recognition stream, the creation of the state-wide Sea Level Rise Exposure Area tool and accompanying Vulnerability Assessment, released in 2017, provided crucial data that allowed policymakers to define the scope of sea level rise impacts and to devise more technically feasible solutions.