Coastal Sustainability and Institutional Resilience: How Countries Respond to Harmful Algal Blooms

Coastal communities dependent on marine resources face chronic and acute threats from harmful algal blooms (HABs) that demand effective institutional responses. Resilience offers a useful framework for assessing how communities monitor, respond to, and adapt to these hazards, as well as how the institutions they have developed shape those capacities. Historically, affected communities have developed institutions to mitigate these hazards, making institutional resilience a valuable analytic lens. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to examine institutional measures for preventing and mitigating HABs in coastal waters. Using a most-similar-systems design, it analyzes institutional resilience-building measures in four democracies with distinct institutional configurations: the United States, Australia, Norway, and Japan. By distinguishing between ex ante (proactive) and ex post (reactive) measures and comparing responses to tempo-rally similar HAB events, the analysis identifies institutions as key explanatory variables shaping risk assessment, monitoring uptake, and policy effectiveness. Evaluating HAB governance through a resilience lens provides planners and decision-makers with a practical basis for developing a more balanced portfolio of responses in a dynamic hazard environment. This analysis suggests that sustained investment in a balanced approach – one that incorporates proactive measures – offers the most effective strategy for strengthening long-term adaptive capacity in confronting the hazard posed by HABs.