The dynamic adaptation pathways approach for decision making under uncertainty has been taken up in practice and in science for implementing climate-resilient pathways. Its application in real-world situations is limited to the Dutch Rhine Delta and for the Thames Estuary. To gain more experience using and developing this approach across different institutional, cultural and environmental contexts and scales, we will apply it in a local government flood risk management context in New Zealand. To date, both structural and spatial planning measures have failed to adequately anticipate increasing flood risk from climate change and increasing socio-economic value. We will develop a dynamic adaptive plan and test its robustness across a range of climate and socio-economic futures and for its flexibility to enable continuous adjustments as the climate changes. We will engage with local government using the ‘Sustainable Delta' Game to socialize the approach; evaluate the game sessions; discuss the applicability of the approach in a range of institutional settings, e.g. What is your policy vulnerable to? What could make the policy fail? What are the adaptation options and their path-dependency? Such questions would help identify adaptation tipping points of potential policy actions and pathways after such tipping points, to enable discussion of policy thresholds and assumptions behind a policy. This test case would demonstrate the utility of the pathways approach for decision makers at local scales.