Assessing emerging governance features for community-based adaptation in Timor-Leste and Indonesia: What works and why?

Abstract

Community-based adaptation (CBA) aims to address local vulnerabilities and build the adaptive capacities of rural, remote and/or poor communities to plan for, and cope with, the impacts of future climate changes. Despite its growing popularity in international development, recent experience indicates that CBA interventions are rarely sustained past their project life cycle and often fail to reduce vulnerability. To address these challenges, calls have been made to embed CBA interventions into governance systems that engage stakeholder groups and institutions operating across multiple governance domains and scales, promote local accountability and are supported by leaders or institutional entrepreneurs. However, there is limited understanding as to how and to what extent such features of ‘emerging governance’ can foster more sustained and durable CBA in low-income nations. This thesis addresses this gap. To do so, this thesis assesses the features of governance associated with two CBA programmes implemented in rural and remote communities in Timor-Leste and Indonesia: the Mudansa Klimatica iha Ambiente Seguru (MAKA’AS) programme and the Climate Change Adaptation Project (CCAP). Specifically, the thesis focuses on the roles of networks and multi-scale interactions; accountability in local-level institutions and institutional entrepreneurship in generating more durable CBA in rural areas of low-income nations. Complex systems thinking is used to frame the analytical approach of this thesis and data is collected and assessed through a mixed-methods approach which combines social network analysis with more qualitative research forms of investigation. Three main conclusions emerge from the thesis. First, local participation and ownership of CBA interventions are critical for their durability as local participation helps to ensure activities are locally relevant and legitimate. Second, local participation is enhanced through greater stakeholder diversity and by engagement with private sector groups. Private sector groups are found to play a particularly important role in CBA governance by providing access to funds and resources needed to maintain CBA interventions and support behaviour change. The presence of the private sector is particularly important in areas where local government remains weak or lacks the will or mandate to participate in CBA interventions. To this end, emerging governance approaches can be effective in building more durable CBA because of their emphasis on engaging private and public sector actors and on building the general adaptive capacities of all of those involved in governance. However, numerous contextual challenges and the conceptual underpinnings of emerging governance make such approaches highly challenging in low-income nations like Timor-Leste and Indonesia. More specifically, this thesis finds that emerging governance approaches may be unrealistic in the context of low-income nations as they require both a well-developed private sector and/or private actors that are willing to go beyond or even contradict their own self-interest. In addition, the social and political shifts taking place in rural communities, and the uncertainties of climate change itself, combine to make governance goals and objectives ambiguous. Accordingly, this thesis argues that calls to embed CBA into multi-scale governance systems should be treated with strong caution; linking CBA with emerging forms of governance is challenging and not a panacea that should be expected. This thesis therefore calls for a shift away from project-based interventions supported by multi-scale governance towards a focus on local decision-making and support for cognate institutional structures that are already supporting rural development efforts in low-income nations.