Making good on the promise of climate adaptation that is truly “locally-led” and thereby focused on community resilience means “radical shifts” in the distribution of resources and power, says an international team of adaptation researchers.
Summarizing their recent paper in a guest post for Carbon Brief, the team of nearly a dozen authors draws a direct line between the failure of many adaptation projects to bolster local climate resilience and the fact that more than 90% of global climate finance never reaches those who need it most.
“Acknowledgement of this [reality] has triggered calls to strengthen locally-led adaptation (LLA),” they write. The article cites a recent post by WeADAPT which identified LLA as a central topic at an international conference on community-based adaptation in May in Bangkok, Thailand.
LLA has been emerging as a better practice, the authors say, with growing understanding that community-based adaptation is not necessarily community-led. Parsing that difference includes “defining what ‘local’ really means, deciding who controls resources, and agreeing how to track success,” they say.
Part of the problem, the article adds, is that the definition of “local” is a matter of perspective.
“Some see the national government (as opposed to international organizations) as local, while some focus on individual members of a vulnerable household,” write co-author Danielle Falzon and her team. Ultimately, “in any interpretation, ‘local’ will never be homogenous and there will always be a risk of those in power benefitting the most from adaptation projects.”
That reality calls for “critical reflection” on the “who” and “what” of any adaptative effort, to try to ensure that power imbalances at the local level do not reappear in LLA efforts. To this end, WeADAPT is calling for the mobilization and funding of youth-led adaptation.
Control of adaptation resources is an important underlying issue, Falzon and colleagues add. While current practice has adaptation finance “earmarked by funders for projects that match their interests and capacities,” realizing the true potential of LLA will require “approaching adaptation finance from the perspective of climate justice.”
They write that their research “shows that funding and planning organizations must change their own institutional infrastructures to make it easier for local actors to engage and access funding directly, and that this funding should be consistent and transparent.”
In addition to repairing a substantial trust deficit, such changes would remove another frequent stumbling block to LLA efforts: timelines that are narrowly focused on a particular project, and often too short to be effective. Changing the funding rules to allow direct access to dollars would “facilitate local control over projects in the long term,” the researchers add.
Project evaluation is also a concern. The team cites a 2020 study in the small island state of Vanuatu which revealed “an emphasis on short-term deliverables to report to funders” under the community-based adaptation model. To reorient measures of success to align with the values and goals of local communities, LLA efforts “should be guided by flexible definitions of ‘success’ that include locally appropriate measures for ‘failure’,” the authors write.
“The collective goals of experimentation, collaboration, and deep learning are critical to LLA,” they add.
Such goals would help enact the “radical shifts in power” the authors identify as critical to transform climate adaptation into a process that actually delivers climate resilience.
Notwithstanding the current barriers to LLA, Falzon and colleagues stress that “current actors” like donors, non-government organizations, research organizations, and consulting companies will continue to have “important roles to play moving forward.” They’ll remain critical as sources and conduits of hard data, and of “advice, guidance, and technical support that can be adapted by local organizations and made relevant to local conditions and circumstances.”
That external expertise and experience will also be valuable in helping to “draw attention to the underlying drivers of vulnerability at the local level,” and to “protect local actors from counterproductive incentives and pressures.”
