Climate change adaptation (CCA) policies require scientific input to focus on relevant risks and opportunities, to promote effective and efficient measures and ensure implementation. This calls for policy relevant research to formulate salient policy recommendations. This article examines how CCA research may contribute to policy recommendations in the light of idealized set of knowledge production attributes for policy development in Finland. Using general background information on the evolution of CCA research and a case study, we specifically examine how the set of attributes have been manifested in research serving CCA and discuss how they have affected the resulting policy recommendations. We conclude that research serving CCA can be improved by more explicit reflection on the attributes that pay attention to the context of application, the methods of teamwork and a variety of participating organizations, transdisciplinarity of the research, reflexivity based on the values and labour ethos of scientists and novel forms of extended peer review. Such attributes can provide a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for knowledge production that strives to bridge the gap between research and policy.