The Policy Gap is a Design Problem
COASTAL RESILIENCE SERIES · ARTICLE 1 OF 5
The Policy Gap Is a Design Problem
Daniel Pingaro, MLA · Ocean Conservation & Coastal Resilience
The policy gap in coastal resilience is not a gap between good ideas and bureaucrats. It is a gap between the pace of ecological and climatic change and the pace at which governance systems adapt as well as public understanding aligning with funding support. Those timelines are not aligned. The space between them, where real decisions about real coastlines get made, is where coastal practitioners spend most of their working lives.
The Architecture of Delay
The Coastal Zone Management Act was signed in 1972. The National Flood Insurance Program was established in 1968. These are the foundational instruments of American coastal governance, and they were designed for a coast that no longer exists during a time when sea level rise was a distant projection, not a measurable present reality, and when the concept of managed retreat would have been treated as a fringe position, if acknowledged at all.
The NFIP's structural problems have been documented extensively: its chronic inability to price risk accurately, its repeated bailouts after major storm events, its incentives that have subsidized development in the most vulnerable coastal areas. What is less often discussed is what this means at the design scale. When the regulatory and financial framework signals that a flood-prone parcel is insurable and developable, no amount of design innovation at the site level changes the fundamental equation. Design innovation operates inside a system that is, in important ways, working against it.
State-level coastal adaptation planning has proliferated in the past decade from California, Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and others have produced serious, technically sophisticated documents. But the translation of state adaptation plans into local land use decisions remains uneven. A state plan that identifies a stretch of coastline as high-risk for managed retreat in thirty years likely has limited practical effect if the municipality within that stretch continues to approve coastal development permits. The plans and the decisions happen in different political universes.
"The policy gap is not a gap between good ideas and bureaucrats. It is a gap between the pace of ecological change and the pace at which governance systems adapt as well as public understanding aligning with funding support."
What This Requires of Practitioners
For most of history, the implicit contract was that developers, landscape architects, and coastal engineers would produce the best possible design within the existing regulatory framework and that the regulatory framework was someone else's problem. That contract has expired.
The most effective coastal practitioners I have encountered in conservation work and in practice operate simultaneously at the design scale and the policy scale. They understand which sections of the Coastal Zone Management Act create leverage for innovative approaches. They have built relationships with Army Corps of Engineers district staff not as a permitting formality but as a genuine professional exchange. Some of them may sit on state coastal commission advisory panels, contributed to rulemaking processes, and published technical guidance that became incorporated into regulatory standards.
This is not a demand that every landscape architect become a policy advocate. It is a recognition that the design process does not end at the permit desk. The regulatory terrain is part of the site. Reading it with the same rigor brought to reading hydrology or soil structure is not peripheral to coastal practice. It is coastal practice.
There is also a harder truth here. Some of the frameworks that currently govern coastal development need to be rewritten. The landscape architecture profession has both the technical knowledge and the practical experience to contribute to that rewriting.
Design as Argument
There is one more dimension to this that tends to get lost in technical discussions of permitting and policy. Design is not just a technical act. It is an argument about what a place can be. A well conceived living shoreline design does not simply demonstrate that nature-based solutions can perform in a given wave energy environment. It demonstrates a vision of what the relationship between human settlement and coastal ecology can look like over the coming decades.
That design argument has to be clear to agency staff, to community members, to elected officials, to funders. The design has to carry the policy case within it. This is not a concession to non-technical audiences. It is a recognition that coastal resilience is, ultimately, a political project. The science informs it. The design shapes it. But it requires sustained public and institutional will to actually happen.
Building that will is part of the work. Making the argument is part of the design. The policy gap is real, and it is large, and closing it will require more than better designs. But better designs designs that are also arguments, that are also demonstrations, that are also invitations to join are where it starts.
Next in the series — Article 2: What Nature-Based Solutions Can and Cannot Do: an accounting of where these approaches work, where they don't, and what the limits reveal about our assumptions.
