Planning, evaluating and making decisions about long-term climate change adaptation strategies takes place under conditions of uncertainty. There are complexities associated with projecting the extent of future change in biophysical, socioeconomic, technological and institutional stressors, along with the impact of social, economic and environmental losses and damage over long timeframes. Since 2010, there have been a number of Australian coastal adaptation case studies published by local government, largely driven by the 2011-2012 Australian Government’s coastal adaptation decision pathways (CAPPs) project. This presentation identifies characteristics of the decision-making approach (objectives, time horizon), decision process and metrics used in recent practice by Australian local government to develop coastal adaptation strategies. Case studies are compared with leading scenario-based approaches to decision analysis under conditions of deep uncertainty used in the international domain for climate change adaptation. Whilst many of the case studies characterised future impacts over multi-decadal planning horizons with deterministic or stochastic scenarios, recent case studies have shifted from traditional decision analysis methods towards flexible adaptation pathways. Demonstration of adaptation pathways through case studies in local government is still limited and there are few examples of quantitative analysis used to determine preferred adaption pathways. There remains an opportunity for Australian coastal decision-makers to apply advanced decision processes suited to conditions of deep uncertainty for which long-term coastal risk is framed.