Early Warnings, No Actions: A Practice Perspective on Barriers to Anticipatory Action Approaches

Within the manifold approaches of climate adaptation efforts and resilience building, anticipatory action (AA) presents a promising, novel approach that emphasizes acting before a disaster strikes, shifting from reactive crisis response to proactive preparedness. Taking a management and coordination perspective, this paper analyzes challenges to the successful implementation of AA. Drawing on interviews, focus group discussions, meetings and observations with local communities, AA practitioners, local governments and the implementing humanitarian agency in flood-prone regions of Nigeria, this paper identifies five key barriers to AA. These barriers include conflicting timeframes between actors, tensions between short-term feasibility and long-term needs, competing priorities between anticipatory and reactive approaches, structural challenges in integrating AA into existing systems, and trade-offs related to the reliability and credibility of forecasting data. The findings show that these barriers are not isolated or stable, but co-enacted through interrelated practices of multiple actors involved in implementing AA. Adopting a practice perspective on barriers reveals how misalignments in temporalities, priorities, structures, and scales are co-constructed, helping to explain their persistence. We argue that addressing these challenges requires a shift from technical fixes of AA toward a systemic perspective that understands AA as a dynamic and complex governance challenge.