Impacts of climate change, manifested in different forms, are integrally linked with context-specific socio-economic, political, and environmental stressors. Dealing with climatic risks, in most parts, requires understanding these mundane location-specific stressors exacerbated by climate variability and change. In large part, the discussion about dealing with impending threats from climate change has relied on policy objectives hatched at the global and national levels. Despite the fact that these policy objectives are responsible for a wide range of actions at the local levels, they often struggle to incorporate the voices of local communities. With the goal of integrating bottom-up and top-down approaches in climate adaptation and connecting them to local development, the Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) initiative in Nepal makes a promising case. However, little is known about the institutional barriers and enablers of local adaptation initiatives and how they are affected by the political nature of climate adaptation. Using Nepal's LAPA as a case study and relying on a preliminary field visit, analysis of LAPA documents, and interviews with stakeholders, we reveal several obstacles local communities face that limit their ability to adapt. These obstacles include regular challenges such as insufficient financial resources and the lack of implementation support, to more specific ones such as less recognition of local knowledge and power differences among institutions and between local-level stakeholders having varying interests, power, and views. Our results show gender-based differences on a few key issues. By building on the local knowledge, enhancing local capacity, and by fostering interaction among different actors having unequal power relationships, local efforts such as LAPA can increase the ownership of adaptation policy objectives both at global and local levels. Most importantly, this paper reveals the struggle in linking identified options for dealing with climate change with everyday practices of managing risk and uncertainty.
Institutions have a crucial role in communicating climate science into meaningful forms and to develop context specific adaptation options. Led by multiple institutions, Climate Smart Village (CSV) in Nepal is an organized approach to designing location specific package of interventions in response to climatic and other ongoing changes in the agricultural system. While addressing the impending risk of climate change and promoting food security objectives in smallholder settings, the CSV approach aims to increase the adoption of Climate Smart Agricultural (CSA) technologies at the local levels. One of the challenges, however, has been to sustain and scale the CSA technologies and practices. Based on the in-depth review of policy documents, field observations, and interviews with stakeholders involved in the implementation of pilot programs, this study evaluates the institutional framework of the CSV approach in the Gandaki region, Nepal. Our analysis proposes a revised conceptual model of innovation in the agricultural system that contributes to an increase in knowledge, attitude, and skills of multiple stakeholders for agricultural adaptation and the scaling of appropriate options. Our case demonstrates that while the scaling of the CSV approach is a concern, the institutional innovation around CSV has been instrumental in making farmers aware of CSA technologies. This has been done largely through collaboration among public, private, civil society organizations, and communities. This collaborative effort illustrates the possibilities for scaling the CSV approaches in the future and highlights their contribution to climate and development goals.
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