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ABSTRACT Amidst 21st‐century climate‐related threats, municipal elected officials (EOs) may outsource public services to third parties to avoid the political costs of adopting “unpopular” sustainability policies—a strategy known as political decoupling. However, decoupling raises accountability concerns and may not improve sustainability, leading some municipalities to “recouple” services. To help understand the political impacts of these decisions, we assess how public scrutiny toward EOs in US municipalities changes after varying degrees of coupling in the water provision sector (i.e., how much service delivery shifts away from or toward municipal oversight). Analysis of local media coverage shows public attention toward EOs decreases after higher degrees of decoupling and recoupling, public opinion becomes polarized toward EOs after decouplings, and the public links sustainability‐related issues to EOs after high degrees of decoupling. The results highlight how reforming public services relates to political accountability‐related factors and raise critical questions about the political decoupling strategy. 

Feedback is ubiquitous in complex systems and critical to the process of designing public policies to solve problems such as climate adaptation. However, well‐known cognitive and institutional constraints can impact information feedback processes, limiting a system's ability to incorporate feedback into policy designs. This study analyzes the role that institutions play in regulating feedback in coupled infrastructure systems (CIS) to support the development of climate‐adaptive policies. Focusing on urban water systems, we ask:how do multilevel institutions governing information processing influence urban water systems' climate‐adaptive policy responses?Using the CIS framework, we develop a theoretical argument for policy design based on the cognitive model of active inference. Drawing on hydrological, administrative, media, interview, and institutional data, we trace two urban water systems' policy design processes over a decade. We find that successive waves of state‐level changes to water planning rules prompted more “exploratory” information processing during the study period. Moreover, an urban water utility's ownership type (public vs. investor‐owned) influenced how expected climate impacts were incorporated into policy designs. These findings provide insight into how institutional arrangements shape policy designs and suggest ways such arrangements may be altered to enable adaptive responses in the face of environmental uncertainty.