Sarbeswar Praharaj, Shouraseni Sen Roy, Sofia Bond, Mirna Obeid, Tyreke Walker
Coastal communities worldwide face increasingly complex and evolving risks due to climate change. In response, local governments at various levels develop resilience plans to support adaptation and mitigation. However, there is limited research on whether and how these multi-level, cross-sectoral strategies across the network of plans are coordinated to achieve a unified, long-term, resilient future. This study presents an in-depth content analysis of 37 resilience plans for Miami-Dade County, Florida, to examine recurring concepts and themes across these documents and to identify patterns of convergence and divergence in proposed solutions. We develop rigorous methods for assessing networks of plans, evaluating how well they collectively address equity, demonstrate integration with other proposals, reflect dynamic relationships across governance levels, and present measurable frameworks for assessing the co-benefits of implementation. We find that flood resilience and environmental management emerge as dominant themes across the different plans, while health and equity considerations remain underrepresented. The plans converge around expanding green spaces, improving canal systems, and installing flood barriers, yet their approach to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions remains loosely defined. Neighborhood-level plans consistently perform better on most indicators compared to city and county plans. Findings reveal that weak integration and limited feedback across the planning network, along with the absence of co-benefit evaluation mechanisms, undermine coordinated climate-resilience governance. The assessment methods presented here are transferable for multi-scale analysis of resilience plans worldwide, contributing to the scholarship and practice of environmentally sustainable and socially resilient cities.