Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change
Conceptualizing Meso‐Level Organizations and Their Relations to Catalyze Transformative Climate Adaptation
2025-12-03
Planned adaptation programs and projects typically span organizational levels. Adaptation resources are channeled through networks of actor relations, spanning macro‐level policy and finance actors to micro‐level communities and households. Although undertheorized and rarely the focus of adaptation research, a plethora of organizational actors operate between and across the macro‐ and micro‐levels, playing instrumental roles in the design, implementation, and evaluation of adaptation investments. As pressure mounts for adaptation policy and investment to address emergent risks as well as underlying vulnerability drivers, these “meso‐level” organizations are instrumental in meeting more transformative goals. We conceptualize meso‐level organizations and their relations as a sub‐system in planned climate adaptation investment, operations, and governance that challenges pre‐conceived notions of linear top‐down/bottom‐up flows of adaptation resources and capacities. Synthesizing insights from organization studies, climate adaptation, and sustainability science literatures, we advance a framework to describe and theorize how organizations, by themselves and in groups, contribute to transformative adaptation. The framework structures organizational processes and inter‐organizational dynamics in three dimensions—knowledge synthesis, institutional ambition, and power—and nine subdimensions that depict potential targets for macro‐level investment and policy to build meso‐level transformational capacity, and for meso‐level self‐assessment and reflection for strategic improvement. This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Knowledge and Action in Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance