As adaptation deficits become increasingly evident and widespread, barriers to adaptation draw more attention as a key reason. However, the current understanding of the barriers is limited, making it challenging to provide practical solutions for real-world adaptation policy processes. This study aims to identify the origins, influences, and relationships of common barriers to national adaptation policy processes, and to analyse their causal mechanisms. The findings present a barrier map that illustrates potential causal mechanisms of common barriers to national adaptation policy processes and, based on it, suggest a systematic approach for practical solutions.

Despite progress in national adaptation policies in the last two decades, the adaptation deficit is getting wider and barriers to adaptation are regarded as a key reason for it. However, our understanding of barriers to adaptation does not help improve real adaptation processes. Based on South Korean and UK cases, this study identified 17 common barriers to national adaptation policy processes and placed them in four categories. It also identified the barriers' origins and influences, drew a common barrier map underlying national adaptation policy processes and identified causal mechanisms of the common barriers, which were limitedly addressed in the earlier literature. The results highlight that understanding the causal mechanisms of barriers to national adaptation policy processes is important to devise practical solutions to overcome barriers and improve the effectiveness of real adaptation processes. The findings also offer a practical understanding of common barriers to national adaptation policy, which can help adaptation policy stakeholders and practitioners to diagnose policy problems, analyse what barriers and origins are related to the problems, decide what should be addressed first to solve the problems, and ultimately make efforts to reduce the current adaptation deficit.

New study identifies causal mechanisms of 17 common barriers to national adaptation policy processes & suggests a systematic approach to overcome the barriers.