Scaling up the use of tools for community-based adaptation: issues and challenges

Abstract

Over the years, donor agencies, international organisations and NGOs have issued an array of guidance documents and tools on climate change adaptation and its integration into development programming, covering a broad spectrum between ‘generic mainstreaming guidance’ (UNDP 2010: 6), on the one hand, and specific tools for adaptation, on the other. Few of them provide guidance on how to scale- up community- based adaptation (CBA) knowledge and practical lessons. This gap is an important concern, as there is a growing need for CBA to reach a critical mass, both horizontally across a larger number of vulnerable communities and vertically to support policy traction at local, national and international levels. This chapter discusses the particular challenges of scaling up CBA through tools and methods. For tools targeting CBA2 these challenges are numerous. A first set of challenges concerns building and sharing knowledge and scalable experiences of CBA. In our view, these processes and steps constitute a substantial precondition for the process of scaling up CBA practice itself, which comes with a second set of challenges. Before discussing these in more detail, however, we take a brief look at efforts to take stock of adaptation tools made to date, and define what we mean by ‘scaling up’ in the context of this chapter and of CBA tools.