1520: Multistakeholder Partnerships and Climate Adaptation: Insights From Switzerland’s Disaster Insurance (20617)

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Climate adaptation is a key challenge facing the world today and one of the UN's sustainable development goals. Multistakeholder partnerships, particularly in the form of cross—sector partnerships bringing together actors from the public sector, business, and civil society, are often posited as effective tools to achieve climate adaptation. Yet, the evidence of the effectiveness of these partnerships is at best mixed. In this paper, we look at an extreme case of such multistakeholder partnerships, the Swiss system of public sector disaster insurers and resilience actors. This system is widely regarded as effective in providing cheap and comprehensive disaster insurance that also contributes to resilience and adaptation – a goal that eludes many other disaster insurance systems as they face the challenge of increasingly frequent and intense weather phenomena. We use this evidence to call for future research on multistakeholder partnerships to move beyond its current focus on business and civil society actors, and pay closer attention to public sector actors and their role and capabilities.

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