Through interviews with officials, citizen focus groups and document analysis, this paper aims to understand how citizen participation in climate adaptation is governed in Norrkoping, Sweden, and how this impacts local capacity for transformative climate adaptation. Drawing upon key concepts such as Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance, nine elements are drawn out and used as an analytical framework to better understand the conditions of this case. It found that path-dependencies in past and contemporary governance of climate adaptation, and citizen participation were a barrier to transformative climate adaptation. To counteract this, the paper suggests the following to better enable citizen participation in climate adaptation: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups; co-designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyze and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.