Asking for an impossible task? Potentials and limitations of locally led development cooperation in Cambodia

Climate resilience in subsistence agricultural communities depends strongly on the robustness and effective management of the agricultural natural resource base. For this reason, adaptation planning efforts frequently focus on natural resource conservation as the primary motivation for and primary outcome of adaptation activities. Here, we present an analysis of the sustainability of community based adaptation (CBA) activities in 20 community based organizations (CBO) that were established in the Blue Nile Highlands of Ethiopia in order to promote resilience to climate change. CBA sustainability was assessed through multi-criteria analysis using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Sustainability was considered for social, institutional, technical, financial, and environmental dimensions, with second-order indicators or factors defined for each dimension. According to this analysis, CBA efforts of two thirds of the COBs studied were found to be unsustainable in all dimensions and CBA efforts of the remaining CBOs were found to be at risk of unsustainability. A number of barriers to CBA sustainability were identified, including inadequacies in community participation, training of local community members, local government commitment, farmer capacity, and bureaucratic efficiency. Participatory evaluation of CBA, however, revealed that many of these barriers can be attributed to the decision to use conservation of natural resources as the primary framework for CBA activities. Based on this evaluation, new efforts have been developed that use markets as the entry and exit points for sustainability activities. Lessons learned in this project are relevant for CBA efforts in other agricultural regions of the developing world.

Till date, successful community-based climate change adaptation projects and programs are rare; rather, the resentment and frustration among the local populace are ever increasing. Community-based climate change adaptation programs become nothing more than a trap to circumvent the local communities to get some plans sanctioned, encoded by the external agencies. The reason is that participation is not a simple, straightforward notion. In this chapter, it is argued that given manifold comprehension of participation, its unshackled, combative frameworks and numerous as well as dubious operation methods and techniques, the actual implementation of the participatory projects and programs is in the hand of implementation agencies. Their willingness, understanding, skills, and capacities determine to a great extent how successfully local communities can be engaged in the climate change adaptation programs. If the community’s participation in climate change adaptation projects needs to be enhanced, it is critical to explore how stakeholders including government officials, technocrats, project managers, and donor agencies conceptualize and idealize community participation. But, in climate change adaptation studies, no such initiative has ever been made. This chapter aims to identify stakeholders’ perspectives on effective ways, steps and factors for ensuring effective community participation in climate change adaptation programs and projects based on a case study in the Wa West district of Northern Ghana. We interviewed key stakeholders including government and non-government official involved in various climate change adaptation programs.

ABSTRACTThe focus on climate change adaptation, rather than mitigation, has become more prominent since the turn of the century. Given this, it is important to consider what has been achieved so far, particularly community-based approaches which have become the resolve for practitioners and donor agencies working in the sector. This review of 128 publications on community-based climate change adaptation, identified through a systematic database search, follows the development of this body of work in the academic literature. Commencing in the early 2000s, the literature detailed the emergence of community-based adaptation (CBA), driven by a number of factors: recognition of the human dimensions of changes; appreciation of the role of local knowledge for strengthening adaptive capacity; and a push to focus on the scale at which impacts are felt and link this action with pro-poor development outcomes. A more substantial body of work emerged in the literature from 2010 onwards, defining a series of key enablers for effective CBA, which included: use participatory approaches; recognise that adaptation is a social process; and support CBA at multiple scales. More recently, there has been a growing emphasis in the literature to re-conceptualise CBA, which will require focusing on innovation, learning and multi-sectoral approaches.

ABSTRACTAcross the Global South, community-based adaptation (CBA) projects are increasingly being implemented in an effort to respond effectively and sustainably to the impacts of climate change, with a particular focus on people’s livelihoods. Despite an increase in the number of CBA projects being implemented, detailed analysis and evaluation of their efficacy and the barriers faced in achieving successful outcomes is lacking. This study draws on an analysis of grey literature (i.e. project and donor reports) to explore the barriers faced in achieving effective CBA. An extensive global search of online project evaluations yielded 25 documents comprising 69 projects from which this analysis is based. This paper first presents an overview of the 69 projects and highlights any trends. Second, this paper describes the barriers to CBA according to three broad themes: socio-political, resource, and physical systems and processes. Following this is a discussion of the most prevalent barriers: cognitive and behavioural, financial, and human resources. Third, this paper discusses the key findings elucidated from this review. This includes the need for greater sharing of project reports and findings so lessons can be learned across spatial and temporal scales, and the disparity between critical academic literature on CBA and what is implemented in practice.

Community-based planned adaptation has become a popular vehicle for building the adaptive capacity of communities vulnerable to climate change. In the global south, planned adaptation interventions are often implemented by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with the support of bilateral and multilateral donors. This paper examines the influence of external agencies involved in funding, planning and implementation of community-based adaptation (CBA) initiatives in Bangladesh. We show that the principles of CBA are negatively impacted by top-down project design, simplistic notions of “community”, lack of downward accountability and pressures to meet tight timeframes. We found that NGO-initiated CBA interventions tended to repeat the past mistakes of bottom-up approaches, primarily because of embedded institutional culture that inhibits the possibility of achieving socially just, effective and sustainable adaptation outcomes in Bangladesh. We argue that the automatic and normative attribution of NGO interventions as being “good” needs deconstructing to ensure that future initiatives are aligned with and prioritise community needs over external expectations. This requires flexible funding, planning and implementation structure for adaptation projects, which may forge new ways of engaging communities and locally led innovation to adapt to climate change.

Throughout history, human societies have had to effectively devise ways and means to adapt to climate variability by altering their lifestyles, agriculture, settlements and other critical aspects of their economies and livelihoods. The capacity to adapt enables societies to deal with a range of uncertainties. Coping and adaptation is a way of life in Nigeria, where climate variability is the norm and where planting cycles in a largely rain-fed agricultural system are affected by reoccurring droughts, floods and other extreme weather events. Climate change scenarios for Nigeria suggest a warmer climate and projected changes in precipitation suggest it will be wetter in the south along the coast and drier in the northeast. The climate models also suggest more extreme heat events will occur. Resource dependent people, such as farmers, hunters and fishers, who depend directly on the productivity of natural resources around them for their livelihoods, are the first to be impacted by these changes in local environmental conditions. The Government of Nigeria is a signatory to the UNFCCC and there is an initiative underway to develop a national strategy for community-based climate change adaptation. Since 2007, the Nigerian Environmental Study/Action Team (NEST) is an NGO has been implementing the project Building Nigeria’s Response to Climate Change (BNRCC). Pilot Projects are one component of BNRCC, and are designed to test adaptation options on a small scale in order to strengthen the resilience of communities to climate change, increase their adaptive capacity and provide recommendations based on lessons learned from community-based adaptation projects to the national strategy. The projects involve seven partner organizations who are working directly with 15 vulnerable communities spanning Nigeria from the Sahel in the north east to the Coastal/Rainforest in the south east. The projects include but are not restricted to: increasing food security by introducing improved crop varieties; testing alternative livelihood options such as aquaculture in order to provide a means of income and decrease reliance on dwindling forest resources; providing fuel efficient wood stoves; improving access to water sources to deal with water scarcity; and tree planting for ecosystem rehabilitation.

Urban citizens increasingly need to adapt to climate risk. This is especially the case in informal settlements that have limited state engagement and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Community-based adaptation (CBA) in the informal settlement has the potential to support the transformation that re-shapes power relations as well as reducing climate risk. This paper explores how multiscalar governance in Cape Town can either empower or undermine CBA to flooding in informal settlements. Drawing on urban political ecology, the analysis reveals significant tension around differing ideas of the temporality of informal settlements, as well as token community inclusivity in participatory planning processes. While everyday governance practices have been used by the City of Cape Town at the local scale, a local community-based organisation has used insurgent planning to envision and enact a more just city. A community designed and spear-headed reblocking process (rearranging shacks in a settlement to allow for flood drainage and service delivery) is a powerful example of CBA and represents the potential of community-based organisations to take steps towards transformative action. In order to enable more widespread urban transformative CBA, it is important to address the drivers of vulnerabilities and underlying power dynamics of political decision-making to destabilise the status quo and move towards real adaptation.

Scholars of gender and climate change argue that gender-blind climate change actions could exacerbate existing inequalities and undermine sustained climate change adaptation actions. For this reason, since 2017, the Green Climate Fund placed gender among its key programming prerequisites, making it the first multilateral climate fund to do so worldwide. However, to date, no lessons to inform planned gender-responsive ecosystem-based interventions in Namibia have been drawn from community-based natural resource management. Thus, this paper aims to share key lessons regarding the way in which gender assessment is useful in enhancing equity in an ecosystem-based adaptation programme for the Green Climate Fund. To this end, we conducted in-depth interviews and group discussions in the 14 rural regions of Namibia with 151 participants from 107 community-based natural resource management organisations (73.5:26.5; male:female ratio). The results identified gender imbalances in leadership and decision-making due to intersecting historic inequalities, ethnicity and geography, as well as other socio-cultural factors in local community-based natural resource management institutions. We also identified income disparities and unequal opportunities to diversify livelihoods, gendered differentiated impacts of climate change and meaningful participation in public forums. Overall, the assessment indicates that considering gender analysis at the initiation of a community-based climate change adaptation project is crucial for achieving resilience to climate change, closing the gender gap, building capacity to increase equity and empowering women in resource-dependent environments in Namibia and Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.

Pacific Island communities are increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change. Inaccessibility to relevant information about contemporary climate change adaptation strategies at the community level presents challenges. At the same time, indigenous strategies to adapt to climate changes have been overlooked in both local and global climate change debates. This article discusses a project undertaken with a community on Andra Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Climate change impacts and adaptation strategies were explored through photo essays developed by community members, engaging in approaches of visual participatory action research and indigenous research approaches. The collaboration with the Andra Island community created a space for reflective dialogue about challenges posed by climate change as well as how photo essays can be used to promote Indigenous Knowledge (IK) as a viable capital for community-based adaptation (CBA). Within this context, this article demonstrates how climate change is both a natural and cultural process of change which poses socio-economic challenges. These challenges can compel people to engage in unsustainable practices that might exacerbate natural climate change impacts. The article highlights that building community capacity in participatory media can be an important tool to forge collective synergy, dialogue and ownership in local climate change initiatives. In particular, the authors demonstrate how participatory media can be harnessed to integrate indigenous knowledge in community-based climate change adaptation.

Community-based adaptation has gained significant international attention as a way for communities to respond to the increasing threats and complex pressures posed by climate change. This bottom-up strategy represents an alternative to the prolonged reliance on, and widespread ineffectiveness of, mitigation methods to halt climate change, in addition to the exacerbation of vulnerability resulting from top-down adaptation approaches. Yet despite the promises of this alternative approach, the efficacy of community-based adaptation remains unknown. Its potential to reduce vulnerability within communities remains a significant gap in knowledge, largely due to limited participatory evaluations with those directly affected by these initiatives, to determine the success and failure of project design, implementation, outcomes and long-term impact. This paper seeks to close this gap by undertaking an in-depth evaluation of multiple community-based adaptation projects in Tanna Island, Vanuatu and exploring community attitudes and behavioural changes. This study found that future community-based adaptation should integrate contextual specificities and gender equality frameworks into community-based adaptation design and implementation, as well as recognise and complement characteristics of local resilience and innovation. In doing this, the critical importance of looking beyond assumptions of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) as homogenous, primarily vulnerable to climate change and lacking resilience, was also recognised.

Adaptation to climate change is becoming an increasingly important part of the development agenda in Ethiopia. CC adaptation can be integrated with development imitative at local level through Community-Based Organizations (CBOs). Twenty-one legally recognized CBOs have been established to implement adaptation actions with collective objectives of environmental protection and livelihood improvement (sustainable development) in the Choke Mountain Watersheds, Upper Blue Nile Highlands. These CBOs organized themselves voluntarily, drafted their own bylaws, have registered their Association (cooperative society) before an authorized registering body, by opening their bank account and manage various transaction with reasonable financial bookkeeping. Existing field-based extension approaches and methods of watershed planning were used with the active participation of the local level administration. The adaptation options focused on options that are proven environmentally and economically successful elsewhere, but are not widely known or practiced in the Choke Mountain watersheds, i.e. “no regret” options. Conservation of the natural resource base was taken as an entry point for planning adaptive actions. The sustainability of individual CBOs was assessed based on aggregate values of the five sustainability dimensions (social, institutional, technical, financial, and environment dimensions). The sustainability values ranged from 0.39 to 0.66 with a median of 0.4680 which is below the average value. There is no sustained CBO that obtains a 70% score (or more) in all sustainability dimensions and in aggregated form. Six CBOs (30%) sustained but at risk CBO getting a 50% score (or more) in an aggregated form from all dimensions. The rest 70% (14 CBOs) fail to obtain a 50% score in an aggregated form or in any of the factors and are not sustainable in all the dimensions. Repeatedly occurring critical barriers are community participation, training of local community members and administrators, information management, local govern¬ment commitment, limited farmers’ capacity and extended bureaucracy and difficult terrains. While much has been learned through these projects, the sustainability of projects that take the natural resource base as an entry point has come into question. Based on this experience, we recommend that markets are a more appropriate entry and exit point for future resilience building efforts. This recognition has yielded a model that centers on the establishment and implementation of community-based Innovation Platforms, devoted to achieving a climate resilient green economy through dissemination and uptake of proven technologies and practices.

ABSTRACTEfforts aimed at urban poverty reduction and service delivery improvement depend critically on slum dwellers’ collective agency. Adding to a long history of community participation approaches, there is a now growing incidence of so‐called ‘partnerships’ between municipal agencies, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and slum organizations. Such approaches require a fair representation of a majority of the poor by local community‐based organizations (CBOs), the potential and interest of both poor men and women to organize pro‐actively in collective action, and a CBO leadership that works for the common good. This article puts some key assumptions underlying grassroots‐based strategies under scrutiny. That relations amongst the urban poor are unequal and that they are divided in terms of income, gender and ethnicity has been well documented, but there has been less attention for the fact that the poor, facing conditions of scarcity and competition, rely on vertical relations of patronage and brokerage which may hinder or prevent horizontal mobilization. Rather than being vehicles of empowerment and change, CBOs and their leadership often block progress, controlling or capturing benefits aimed at the poor and misusing them for private (political) interests. Presenting evidence from community‐based projects in the slums of three large Indian cities, the article argues that municipal agencies, donors and NGOs cannot easily escape the logic of patronage and often themselves become part of a system of vertical dependency relations.

Shoreline change and community-based climate change adaptation: Lessons learnt from Brebes Regency, Indonesia

Priority setting, or determining how to best allocate limited resources, is an important first step for evidence-based public health approaches in community-based organizations (CBOs), but guidance for such work is limited. This study aims to study drivers of priority setting and the way CBOs use data for this work. Data come from PLANET MassCONECT, a Community-Based Participatory Research project focused on knowledge translation among CBOs targeting the underserved in Boston, Lawrence, and Worcester, MA. We conducted four focus group discussions with CBO staff members (31 participants) in 2008 and a survey of 214 CBO staff members in 2009. Multiple, often competing factors appear to drive priority setting, including data, funding, partnerships, and community preferences. The process may be hindered by challenges related to finding, evaluating, and utilizing data for priority setting. Supporting CBOs in efforts to use data effectively and incorporate context into systematic priority-setting processes is vital.

Rural coastal communities in Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are amongst the world’s most vulnerable to climate change. This is due to a combination of both high physical exposure (from sea-level rise, increasingly intensified storm surges, tidal inundation, and coastal erosion) as well as a range of underlying social, cultural, historical, economic, and physical factors that generate and drive vulnerability. As such, a plethora of adaptation projects intended to assist such communities in reducing their vulnerability to experienced and future climate change impacts have emerged, with the Pacific Region receiving the highest per capita climate aid globally. Owing to the inadequacies of traditional top-down approaches in achieving successful outcomes for communities, projects implemented at the community level, known commonly as community-based adaptation (CBA) and seen as a bottom-up approach, have been increasingly implemented. Yet, if such projects have been effective in reducing the vulnerability of targeted groups remains equivocal owing in part to the limited (yet growing) empirical case study material.This thesis aims to better understand if community adaptation projects implemented in rural coastal communities in PICs have been successful in providing sustained outcomes and benefits, and further provide insights into how adaptation can be improved in the future. This is achieved through a review of CBA projects published in the grey literature (Chapter 2.0), and three in-depth qualitative case studies across the tripartite of adaptation responses: retreat, protect, and accommodate from communities in both Fiji and Kiribati (Chapter 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0). In total, 16 focus groups (FGs) and 41 interviews were undertaken with a total of 205 participants.First, a review of CBA grey literature is undertaken to gain a snapshot of CBA initiatives globally and explore the main barriers to adaptation success. The grey literature reviewed included reports undertaken by donors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and international NGOs (INGOs). These reports hold a wealth of information on, and lessons about, CBA as these are the organisations often responsible for implementing and reporting on projects. In undertaking this review it was found that the most common barriers to adaptation success were cognitive and behavioural. These barriers reveal limited interest by community members in CBA projects, as well as projects not being in line with the social and cultural views of target communities. This raises questions about the usefulness and role of CBA in reducing people’s vulnerability to climate change impacts in future adaptation efforts. Further, this review detailed the need for evaluation of adaptation from the perspective of those adaptation has been implemented to assist – that of the community.Next, this thesis contributes to the dearth of in-depth case studies, especially those evaluating adaptation from community perspectives. This is achieved through providing an in-depth case study across each of the tripartite of adaptation responses: retreat, protection, and accommodation. This includes a case study of planned relocation (retreat) in two communities – Vunidogoloa and Denimanu – on (and off the coast of) Vanua Levu Island, Fiji; a case study of seawalls (protection) implemented in two communities – Karoko and Korotasere – on Vanua Levu Island Fiji; and a food security project (accommodation) implemented in two communities – Tuarabu and Tabontebike – on Abaiang Island, Kiribati.The three projects were evaluated in terms of their success across the following criteria: appropriateness, efficacy, equity, impact, and sustainability. Overall, despite projects having broad scale appropriateness in terms of being targeted at objective climate related issues (such as flooding or food security), projects had minimal impact and were mostly unsustainable despite being implemented in the five years prior to undertaking field work. In addition, the equity of projects, in terms of access to processes and decision-making, was largely lacking. Key issues that arose within each case study are discussed accordingly and include the need for context specific adaptation driven by local needs and values, the potential of projects to lead to maladaptive outcomes, and the need to consider the wider context of what generates and drives vulnerability in communities. Relevant recommendations and suggestions for enhancing the sustainability of adaptation success are presented and discussed.Overall, this thesis shows that adaptation activities implemented in rural Pacific Island communities are largely failing in achieving their aims. This is owing to the fact that projects are driven by externally defined goals, view communities as homogeneous entities, and are too narrowly focussed on biophysical climate impacts rather than the wider factors that generate and drive vulnerability. A number of unintended, negative outcomes have also been identified including projects inadvertently increasing the vulnerability of target communities. The core conclusion of this thesis is a call for more long-term planning and assessment of site- specific adaptation measures that actively involve and are driven by local perspectives in the planning, implementation, and maintenance process, and account for the heterogeneity in local contexts, both climate and non-climate related.