Jonathon Loos 

Managed retreat is an increasingly important management option for responding to the localized impacts of climate change and poses a complex governance challenge. Floodplain property buyouts represent the largest form of managed retreat currently underway in the U.S. and have been broadly studied as disaster response policy using large national datasets. Research on the local governance dimensions of property buyouts remains limited but critically needed to inform ongoing buyout programs and the design of future retreat efforts. This paper contributes new knowledge of the local governance dimensions of property buyouts and managed retreat by studying forty towns in Vermont that completed property buyouts along streams and rivers following catastrophic flooding in 2011. Using statewide and town-level datasets, measures of the watershed context of each buyout, and qualitative interviews this research seeks to understand the social, institutional, and environmental variables that led some towns to implement many buyouts while other similarly flood-impacted towns implemented far fewer. Results indicate that lower income towns implemented more buyouts and fluvial erosion had an outsized role in driving flood losses on buyout sites. Measures of town governance capacity and local governance paradigm are found to influence the occurrence of property buyouts in complex and unexpected ways. Findings depict how property buyouts are a highly localized process that requires cross-scale governance and hinges upon pre-existing social and institutional networks, local leaders, and trust. Buyouts and retreat processes emerge as a stage for opposing notions over the role of government, landowner rights, and economic development to be contested at the floodplain parcel scale. Findings also demonstrate the limitations of property buyouts in geographically constrained landscapes that are perceived as being bound to risk. Federal buyout programs tend to be unresponsive to local nuance and risk perpetuating systemic inequities where buyout and retreat governance processes cannot be reconciled with local context. These findings can inform the design and administration of buyout and retreat programs to better empower frontline communities to respond to changing environments.