Governing on the Edge of Tomorrow: The Temporal Politics of Climate Action

With risks from climate change intensifying, how are cities deciding to adapt? This dissertation advances a sociological theory of climate adaptation that foregrounds the role of temporality in shaping governance responses to environmental risk. Leveraging an ethnographic, longitudinal case study of four coastal municipalities confronting sea level rise, I argue that city adaptation action is not reducible to institutional capacity, political will, or scientific knowledge alone, but is instead structured through the interaction of governance and climatic time horizons, material geographies, and alignments within the socially constructed field of institutional relations. Tracing each municipality’s adaptation decisions over a decade reveals the dynamic nature of the cities and puts into motion the cadence of social forces influencing choices. Analyzing Pacifica and Marina, California, along with Punta Gorda and St. Augustine, Florida, I demonstrate how inherited infrastructure, ecological buffers, legal regimes, and strategic action fields shape which adaptation pathways become politically feasible. The findings show that adaptation action is most likely when material spatial protections, supportive institutional coalitions, and future-oriented frameworks align, while inherited development patterns and entrenched protection infrastructures generate path dependencies that narrow adaptation possibilities. More broadly, this dissertation contributes to sociological understandings of climate governance by reframing adaptation failure as a structural problem of spatiotemporal misalignment between environmental change and the institutional organization of social life.