Land use planning is widely identified as a local climate adaptation solution. Planning uses resilience concepts to inform the design of new development controls and support evidence based decision making. Under increasing weather extremes and hazards, resilience is proving a brittle approach unlikely to meet local community needs for climate adaptation.

There is a large gap between the scope of the spatial problems managed by land use planning and the adaptive needs of whole communities. The thesis examines how this gap can be bridged. This adaptive capacity gap is framed as a systems learning problem. The thesis draws on a case study of the New South Wales (NSW) Australia to evaluate how local land use planning systems can become more adaptive and allow communities to actively participate in the creation of solutions for climate change impacts.

Local government is expected to play a key adaptation role but enabling governance structures are not yet in place. Local governments, being on the adaptation ‘frontline’, are well placed to enable development of local adaptative capacities, but this depends on the creation of enabling policy frameworks and cooperative arrangements within state governments.

The thesis is structured to answer the question, ‘How can land use planning best solve local adaptation problems?’ With local land use planning identified as a local adaptation solution that lacks adaptive capacity, what needs to be done to better enable local adaptation? Can planning capacities reflect the problems and community needs of the Anthropocene and the future? What can be done to improve local future-making? Calls for governance and institutional change, and systems transformation, as climate change solutions, are well documented but seldom address the practical details. The solution of adaptation pathways is widely agreed but the understanding of the required governance and practice mechanisms hasn’t extended beyond the conceptual stage. The governance changes needed to make specific regulatory systems such as land use planning more adaptive remain largely unexamined. As there are no established methods for investigating adaptive changes to regulatory systems, a combination of realist evaluation, realist science and systems thinking has been utilised for this thesis. [...]