Lessons from Adaptation Leaders: A Grassroots-Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Action

This briefing summarizes a May 2020 virtual dialogue between grassroots organizations, development partners, and donors focused on advancing locally led climate adaptation in Africa. The document outlines key messages for improving the relationship between donors and local actors, emphasizing the need for inclusive design, mutual trust, flexible funding, and long-term engagement to move beyond short-term project models.

• Effective climate adaptation requires inclusive program design and implementation where communities are viewed as partners rather than just recipients. This involves using demand-driven 'circular decision-making' to leverage local knowledge and engaging national leaders and designated authorities to ensure local voices influence legislators and decision-makers.
• Trust and capacity building must be viewed as a bidirectional process. While donors typically focus on building community capacity, local communities simultaneously build donor capacity by providing a knowledge base and establishing best practices. Transparency regarding fund allocation and decision-making processes at both global and grassroots levels is essential for building this mutual trust.
• Current climate finance structures often create an artificial divide between climate change and development, which excludes valuable development-sector knowledge from community work. Additionally, accreditation requirements for funds like the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Adaptation Fund (AF) can hinder local access, though programs such as the AF Readiness Programme and GCF's Enhancing Direct Access (EDA) Pilot aim to streamline this process.
• The standard three-to-five-year project model is insufficient for building the trust and institutional groundwork necessary for sustainable adaptation. To be transformative, funding must move away from time-bound, 'projectized' modalities toward sustained finance integrated into national budgets, avoiding the creation of dependency on transient programs.
• There is a need to invert the 'hierarchy of knowledge' that prioritizes technical and scientific data over indigenous and local knowledge. This can be achieved by documenting grassroots successes through storytelling and collaborating to develop indicators that measure changes in adaptive capacity over time.

APA

Global Resilience Partnership (2020). Lessons from Adaptation Leaders: A Grassroots-Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Action. https://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/grassroots-donor-dialogue-may-21-2020-key-messages-final.pdf

Chicago

Global Resilience Partnership. Lessons from Adaptation Leaders: A Grassroots-Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Action. 2020. https://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/grassroots-donor-dialogue-may-21-2020-key-messages-final.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Global Resilience Partnership |title=Lessons from Adaptation Leaders: A Grassroots-Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Action |date=21 May 2020 |url=https://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/grassroots-donor-dialogue-may-21-2020-key-messages-final.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{globalresiliencepartnership2020lessons, author = {{Global Resilience Partnership}}, title = {{Lessons from Adaptation Leaders: A Grassroots-Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Action}}, institution = {Global Resilience Partnership}, year = {2020}, month = may, url = {https://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/grassroots-donor-dialogue-may-21-2020-key-messages-final.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }