Climate change affects increasingly the management of natural resources and
has diverse impacts of environmental, social and economic nature. To take this
complexity into account, climate change adaptation policies consider the
principle of sustainable development. Sustainability is an integrative concept
which should insure a long-term and multi-sectoral response to climate change.
But the question appears if sustainable development is only retained at the
conceptual level or effectively implemented in practice. This paper pursues
this question by comparing three projects addressing natural hazard in Swiss
mountains. The aim is to investigate how sustainable development is perceived
by involved stakeholders and implemented in practice. Two dimensions are thus
taken into account: the type of actors participating in these projects and
their preferences and interests. The first dimension thus analyzes if diverse
actors representing the environmental, economic and social arenas are
integrated; the second dimension investigates if different interests and
preferences in the sense of sustainability were incorporated in the design and
implementation of climate change adaptation. Data were gathered through a
standardized survey among all actors involved in the three projects.
Preliminary results show that sustainability receives diverse weight and
interest in the different cases