Partnerships among peers, for scaling up Locally Led Adaptation
By linking locally led efforts on the ground to funding from international financial institutions and donors, the Global Center on Adaptation acts as a solutions broker for scaling up locally led adaptation action
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hen it comes to locally led adaptation (LLA), local practitioners and grassroots organizations with experience in implementing effective locally led efforts on the ground are critical partners for the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA). We play the role of broker and facilitator, bringing together local organizations for peer-to-peer and South-South learning. We also link locally led planning efforts with potential funding from projects planned by international financial institutions and donors.
The innovative work done on pioneering locally led planning in the informal settlement of Mukuru, Kenya, for instance, has been documented in a Guide to inform planning exercises elsewhere. At the same time, Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT), one of the organizations that led the planning process, is a partner who will help scale up the work to new cities in Africa through peer-to-peer training.
One of these cities is Monrovia, where AMT will support another GCA local partner, YMCA, in scaling up a planning process in informal settlements, to inform investments through the World Bank Liberia Urban Resilience Project (LURP). Other cities will be chosen through a partnership with United Cities and Local Governments, Africa (UCLGA). UCLGA is a critical partner in supporting the scaling up of such planning efforts, led by the most vulnerable in urban areas, to other cities in the future. Several local governments across Africa have already expressed an interest in such partnerships with the GCA. They are a natural ally and partner for addressing local climate impacts, who face the reality of climate change daily, and understand well the imperative of locally led adaptation.
GCA has also been able to support cross-regional and South-South learning between partners in 2022. When we sought to scale up locally led planning efforts in informal settlements in Bangladesh, we soon learned that a strong body of experience related to informal settlements already exists. Our local partner BRAC, one of the world’s biggest non-government organizations, advised us to work in secondary cities instead, to reduce the influx of migrants to Dhaka, and to focus on making the secondary cities climate migrant friendly by promoting planning processes that view migrants as assets rather than liabilities.
BRAC is now piloting just such a process in Mongla, a secondary coastal city in Bangladesh. With support from GCA, they are supporting local communities to map their vulnerabilities, conduct household and settlement profiling, produce Community Climate Vulnerability Assessments, and use them to develop local, ward, and town-level People’s Climate Resilience Plans. BRAC brings decades of their own experience in community-driven planning. The work is supported by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC) – one of the key partners in the planning efforts in Mukuru – which brings decades of experience from informal settlements around the world. The International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) is a third partner in this project, with the role of providing information on climate impacts to the local planning process and documenting the planning process for replication in other cities in Bangladesh. The approach is already expanding to 3 paurashavas of Bhola, Patuakhail and Kuakata, to inform investments under an Asian Development Bank project in coastal cities.
Already, lessons from the work in Bangladesh are informing our urban LLA work in Africa. Most countries in Africa also face the same issue of climate migrants moving mainly to capital cities, because secondary cities lack in public services and job opportunities. In our efforts within the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP), we seek opportunities to also build capacity in secondary cities, for locally led planning that focuses on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable. To deliver the work, meanwhile, we rely on the expertise of our local partners and the communities they serve. We see our role as facilitators, to promote sharing of knowledge on the processes that support locally led adaptation, and to bring the linkages to climate-specific knowledge and finance for implementation.
Anju Sharma is GCA’s Global Lead on Locally Led Adaptation. She has been Deputy Director of Oxford Climate Policy and Head of the Policy and Publications Unit of the European Capacity Building Initiative. She is an Associate with the Stockholm Environment Institute and has been a Consultant with the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development. Ms. Sharma has previously worked with the UN Environment Programme in Kenya, Oxfam GB in the UK, and the Centre for Science and Environment in India. She has also worked as a Consultant for a number of international organizations, including the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Development Program.
