As climate change impacts rapidly escalate, ensuring the just adaptation of vulnerable communities has become a critical challenge. However, procedural justice—a key pillar of climate justice that focuses on the fairness of policies from a systemic standpoint—remains underexplored. Policy practitioners currently lack the tools to assess whether a policy can meaningfully engage affected groups. This research presents a novel approach to evaluating the procedural justice of climate change adaptation policies ex-ante, before their implementation.

While the impact of institutional structures on the adaptive capacity of systems is well-established, the direct relationship between these structures and the procedural justice of adaptive interventions has not been systematically studied. This research addresses this gap by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and incorporating Institutional Network Analysis to assess the procedural justice of climate adaptation interventions.

The research also demonstrates how Large Language Models support the automation of policy analysis tasks, and may be used to significantly improve the scale and timeliness of policy analysis research.

In this research we identify 4 values critical to procedurally just climate change adaptation policy institutions – namely Voice, Transparency, Accountability and Correctability. We operationalise these values in terms of institutional networks, and develop an empirical method for their identification. The work features a tool to automate extraction of policy statements from documents and features an annotation accuracy of 0.67.

Using this methodology, an empirical case of climate change policy ­— the expansion of Water and Wastewater Systems in Chennai — is investigated. The analysis shows that the institutional environment is severely lacking in procedural justice elements and that policy statements relevant to procedurally justice lack specificity.