• Global governance
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Global governance

Climate change is already affecting poor people and communities around the globe. This paper presents a conceptual framework that turns the mainstream adaptation discourse upside down with autonomous adaptation as the starting point for a new agenda. Autonomous adaptation is the unnoticed, uncoordinated, and unaided adaptation action taken by the poor without any government or international support.

The document examines the climate-related adaptive capacity of people, businesses, and ecosystems and discusses their interactions, complementarities, and competition. It also looks at adaptive capacity across scales - local, national, international - and how interactions among these scales facilitate or stand in the way of adaptation.

The authors describe how efforts must start with recognising the importance of adaptive capacity. It then explores what decades of development experience have revealed about ways to effectively invest in the capacities of individuals and the organisations that poor people rely on. Such investment involves promoting structures of inclusive governance to ensure that the poor can gain access to services and social protection mechanisms in order to deal with the hazards they face. It suggests that adaptation should be built on efforts to better effectively support individuals, households, and businesses as they struggle to adapt to climate change. This should be done with a deeper awareness of the socio-economic, cultural, and political factors that frame their actions, opportunities, and limitations for action.

Recommendations noted by the authors are:

• priority should be given for investments in facilitating demand from those affected by climate change
• existing climate change and risk reduction modalities should be reviewed so as to reconsider centrally planned, science-driven planning and programming processes
• development efforts should support decentralized structures for improved market integration, with greater attention to how markets affect the access and assets that the poor use to manage risk
• adaptation efforts should be planned to reflect the importance of long-term commitments to developing local human, organisational, and institutional capacities and should reflect the tenets of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness
• support to agricultural services must expand, but in different forms than those pursued in the past; this implies developing new risk-aware approaches to extension service provision, ensuring that seed programming reflects the need to preserve and promote agro-biodiversity, and making certain that market-oriented programming reflects the risks inherent in climate uncertainty and variability
• social protection systems need to be aligned with formal and informal risk transfer mechanisms
• guidelines and methods for monitoring, evaluation, and environmental impact assessment should be revised to include greater attention to analysis of risks and vulnerabilities and acknowledgement of the uncertain outcomes.

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