Abstract
Integrating behavioural analysis into social–ecological contexts has increasingly been recognised as a critical approach to addressing fragmentation in climate change adaptation research. In this context, the Social–Ecological COM-B (Se-COMB) framework (Nguyen-Trung et al., 2025), integrating the social–ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979) with the COM-B behavioural model (Michie et al., 2011), situates individual adaptation decisions within broader social, institutional, and ecological conditions rather than treating behaviour as isolated. This study synthesises qualitative and quantitative evidence on the drivers, barriers, and mechanisms shaping climate change adaptation decisions, while outlining pathways for extending Se-COMB toward community-level adaptation. The study combines a qualitative systematic review to identify key factors and causal pathways across individual, community, and system levels with a meta-analysis of 44 quantitative studies assessing the relative strength of key drivers at the individual decision node. Adaptation strategies and explanatory variables were manually coded using theory-informed criteria aligned with the Capacity, Opportunity, and Motivation components of Se-COMB. Results show that Capacity, Opportunity, and Motivation are positively and significantly associated with individual adaptation decisions, yet substantial between-study heterogeneity remains. This heterogeneity reflects the conditioning role of community and system contexts in shaping behavioural mechanisms, with opportunity-related factors exhibiting high contextual sensitivity. Taken together, the findings validate Se-COMB for analysing individual adaptation behaviour while revealing its limitations when adaptation is conceptualised as a multi-level process. The study advances Se-COMB by explicitly accounting for how community and system contexts condition individual behavioural mechanisms, enabling community-level and multi-level adaptation analysis.