ABSTRACT
Climate change presents unprecedented leadership and governance challenges. Managed retreat, defined as the strategic withdrawal of people, assets and activities to reduce risk to place-based climate change harm, will be one of the most vexing. This is because of the deep uncertainty and profound social, environmental, economic and cultural disruption(s) that will be caused by relocating communities. Our chapter sets out to better understand and promote the leadership and governance practices that need to be developed for individuals, businesses, communities, regions and governments to proactively respond to climate change in a responsible, integrated and sustainable way. Some attention has been given to developing governance frameworks that lay out roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. However, we argue that the specific leadership and governance practices that are required for proactive, pre-emptive retreat have been largely ignored. Such practices require urgent attention as they will take considerable time to identify, develop and refine at the local, national and international levels. In this chapter, we argue that to achieve positive leadership for managed retreat, we must take a place-based, long-term stakeholder perspective that is focused on cross-sectoral collaboration.
