The climate transition poses major challenges for urban areas, which make a considerable contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and are often poorly adapted to climate change. Concepts such as urban sustainability, climate urbanism, and urban climate governance are urban climate discourses that adapt the broader climate transition to the urban scale and can be grouped under the Urban Climate Transition (UCT) discourse. Our research asks whether and how the UCT discourse is institutionalised into urban policy and practice. This question is crucial because it is at the urban scale that the climate transition discourse manifests materially through policies on planning, transport and energy, inter alia. Approaches to understanding the institutionalisation of ideas, narratives, imaginaries, and discourses have recently gained traction in urban planning. Cultural Political Economy is one such approach that is concerned with the relationship between semiotic (imaginaries, discourses) and extra-semiotic (material) factors. This research stems from the Urban Retrofit project which investigates place-based adaptations to the built environment through planning and development systems. Within this project we mapped governance structures and policy processes for five secondary UK cities, setting out how the urban climate transition features, and supplemented this with 21 interviews with key policy actors. Our analysis identified factors enabling and constraining the institutionalisation of the urban climate transition along lines of enquiry drawn from Cultural Political Economy that encompass the coherence of the UCT as an imaginary, its interaction with rival imaginaries such as housing development, and material factors such as governance organisation and funding mechanisms.

Globally agricultural policies addressing the biodiversity and climate crises are increasingly characterised by diversified funding landscapes that combine public and private models. Existing research examines policy through individual agri-environment schemes with limited understanding of how agricultural transitions are enacted across multiple funding mechanisms and the work required to navigate and sustain engagement. This paper addresses this gap by examining how diversified agri-environmental funding systems are made workable in practice, providing one of the first integrated and in-depth analyses of England’s post-Brexit agri-environmental funding landscape and, in doing so, providing insights into the potential interactions with the statutory planning system in the delivery of nature recovery.

Drawing on a systematic funding matrix, consultation reports, and 14 interviews with farmers and land managers, the study documents the scale and diversity of emerging agri-environmental funding arrangements, showing how the resulting governance complexity is experienced and managed in everyday decision-making. The analysis shows that diversification intensifies and redistributes labour, much of which remains unrecognised and under-resourced. This ‘hidden work’ has implications for equity, participation, and the sustainability of transitions with transferability to a range of global policy areas and implications for the overlap with planning for nature recovery.

By reframing the work of agri-environmental transition, this paper makes a substantive contribution to applied environmental management. The framework developed offers transferable insights for international policymakers and practitioners designing agri-environmental interventions in other contexts characterised by funding diversification and institutional complexity.

The risks of coastal erosion and flooding are increasing across the UK, yet coastal management approaches remain fragmented and differentiated, with varying legislation, institutional responsibilities and resource limitations creating significant challenges for planning within coastal authorities. In Northern Ireland, the absence of a formalised coastal management framework leaves councils without a clear policy basis for proactive adaptation, creating uncertainty within planning processes. In England, Shoreline Management Plans offer a framework for adaptation, but their integration within spatial planning is inconsistent. Funding for managing coastal risk across the UK is uncertain. Together, these uncertainties create challenges for planners to balance development pressures and socio-economic objectives with longer-term adaptation to coastal change and flooding.

This paper presents findings from a comparative project examining how planners in England and Northern Ireland interpret and manage these uncertainties, drawing on insights from participatory workshops with local authority planners, policymakers and coastal practitioners. The research illustrates the type of uncertainty planners and coastal managers encounter, and reflects upon the institutional and policy conditions that shape their work. In particular, the challenges of balancing longer-term adaptation to coastal risk, with more immediate pressures of meeting housing need and tackling socio-economic challenges. The paper reflects upon how coastal management frameworks shape decision-making, and identifies opportunities and recommendations for more effective responses to the increasing risks of coastal flooding and erosion.