Abstract
Interventions to address climate adaptation have been on the rise over the past decade. Intervention programmes aim to build the resilience of local communities to climate shocks, and ultimately their wellbeing by helping them to better prepare, adapt and recover. Resilience, similar to human wellbeing, is a multidimensional construct grounded in local realities and lived experiences. Yet current evaluation frameworks used in resilience programming rarely consider what resilience means in local contexts prior to implementation. This means policy designs risk failing to improve resilience of communities and creating unintended negative consequences for communities’ wellbeing. Better processes and indicators for assessing resilience are needed. This paper explores the interplay between local predictors of resilience and wellbeing to assess the validity of self-assessed indicators as part of frameworks to measure resilience. We draw from research on the Devolved Climate Finance (DCF) mechanism implemented between 2014 and 2018 in Tanzania. We find that different factors explain resilience when compared to wellbeing; while resilience is primarily influenced by relationships, wellbeing is correlated with livelihoods. This shows that incentives to improve resilience differ from those of wellbeing. Climate and development practitioners must adopt locally grounded framings for resilience and wellbeing to ensure interventions track appropriate indicators, towards positive outcomes.
Highlights
The Devolved Climate Finance (DCF) mechanism consists of four dimensions: (1) the creation of local adaptation committees that identify and implement resilience investments based on inclusive community consultations and pre-defined fund criteria; (2) the use of participatory resilience assessments and climate information-informed local decision-making tools, through which communities identify climate stresses, opportunities and resilience-building priorities; (3) the development of local climate adaptation funds managed by local governments to finance locally-prioritised public good investments in resilience; and (4) local monitoring to assess effectiveness of resilience investments, support iterative learning and inform future planning [44]
The Tanzania DCF project team developed a household survey to measure resilience and identify changes over time in household resilience guided by the TAMD framework, and other monitoring and evaluation (M&E) exercises in Mali and Senegal [17]
The household survey was designed and administered by LTS International, an M&E consulting firm working with DCF project partners to track indicators identified by communities as valuable for increased resilience in planning meetings for DCF investments
Summary
It is critical that governments, funding agencies and interventions integrate climate risks into plans and policies to progress sustainable development in the face of the climate crisis [2]
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