Embedding Adaptation into Development Planning and Decision Making Process at the Municipal Levels in Mozambique

Abstract

Climate change has become one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, particularly for growing cities. In places like Mozambique, the vulnerability of the cities (municipalities) is further compounded by socio-economic constraints that limit the ability of local and national governments to respond to extreme climatic events. All this means that climate change adaptation needs to be understood within a broader socio-economic and environment context. From this, we argue that adaptation interventions must be part of long lasting development plan and not a project per se. In so doing, the starting point should be to set a climate resilient development agenda that adaptation interventions will feed in. Currently indeed, most of the adaptation interventions are stand-alone initiatives based, in most of the cases, in assumptions made mainly by the international donors, NGOs and consultants that what is known globally around climate change apply to local context and can easily be replicated. Hence, pre-cooked ill locally researched interventions are proposed and implemented with very limited impacts. This trend is making adaptation less effective in developing countries despite a growing discourse of climate change adaptation. Against this backdrop, we present a different pathway. This paper addresses interventions by the Coastal City Adaptation Program (CCAP) in two municipalities in Mozambique which seek to apply action-research and use local participation (including local knowledge) to feed adaption interventions in a long lasting development agenda. The paper argues that this approach is far more effective for climate resilience because it responds to local development agenda, allows the prioritization of locally grounded interventions which are supported by a pool of local actors and, because it is locally grounded it allows the embedding of adaptation agenda in the local institution’s everyday planning practices making it sustainable over time.