Although the cities in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China are amongst the world’s cities most exposed to flooding due to climate change, surprisingly little is done to address this problem. This article explores the barriers to the emergence of policies adapting to the growing flood risk in two PRD cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, underlining the importance of the Chinese territorial governance system for adaptive capacity at the local level. Focusing on institutions, ideas and interests as a heuristic device, the article contributes to the literature on urban climate adaptation and the nexus of spatial planning and flood risk management by exploring why and how the development of the adaptive capacity of cities is hampered, despite an urgent need for it.

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability.

In some of the delta cities which are the most exposed to flooding caused by climate change - like Shenzhen and Guangzhou investigated in this paper - there is surprisingly little recognition of this problem and hardly any action is taken to address it. This paper draws on the insights from these two cases to address the following research questions: why certain delta cities ignore climate change risks? What are the obstacles to the emergence of spatial strategies considering climate change adaptation? How do the characteristics of the national governance systems within which cities operate constrain or facilitate their ability to devise integrated responses to climate change impacts? The study draws on qualitative research methods. In addition to desk research and analysis of secondary data, the study draws primarily on semi-structured interviews with the representatives of the relevant municipal and provincial officials and range of spatial planning and water management experts from academia and the private sector. The paper focuses on the role of interests, ideas and institutions in determining the capacity of cities to respond to the growing flood risk in the context of climate change. Such a response requires cooperation across levels of government, administrative boundaries and policy sectors (spatial planning and land use, water management, economic development policy). The study stressed, however, that in the cities under investigation these sectors function in silos with only formalistic coordination, which reflects the wider characteristics of the Chinese policy-making. Moreover, the research highlights the tensions between the priorities in urban development, land use and water management, which render the cities more vulnerable to flooding induced by climate change and help explain why climate change risks are largely ignored in planning and design of the new extensions of the cities. Finally, the findings indicate that while the Chinese national government recognises the risks associated with climate change and pushes the sub-national authorities to develop climate adaptation strategies, the city governments largely resist this pressure and continue to prioritise urban development at breakneck speed, ignoring climate change risks. These tensions and conflicts of interests are a fundamental obstacle to the emergence of urban climate adaptation strategies in the Pearl River Delta cities. The study underscores importance of horizontal and vertical coordination of policies for the city’s willingness and ability to devise adaptation strategies. It enhances our understanding of institutional factors, ideas and conflicting interests and policy priorities that critically affect the capacity of cities to adapt to climate change.