  Adaptive planning is ideally suited for the deep uncertainties presented by
climate change. While there is a robust scholarship on the theory and methods
of adaptive planning, this has largely neglected how adaptive planning is
affected by existing planning institutions and how to move forward within the
constraints of traditional planning organizations. This study asks: How do
existing traditional planning institutions support adaptive planning? We
explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United
States. We draw on county hazard plan and regional flood plan documents as well
as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings to explore the emergent
topics of these institutional outputs. Using Natural Language Processing to
analyze this large amount of text, we find that hazard plans and discussions
developing these plans are largely lacking an adaptive approach.
