 My name is Aditya Bahadur and I'm a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development. In this podcast, we're going to hear from representatives of three organizations that fund and finance adaptation initiatives around the world and explore the reasons for why they signed up with eight principles for locally led adaptation and how they intend to operationalize them. We are also going to hear from someone representing an organization that works with women's groups and local communities on the ground on whether these commitments from adaptation donors are likely to deliver a positive impact on the lives of poor communities. At the Climate Adaptation Summit in January this year, more than 40 major international and local organizations publicly signed up to eight principles for locally led adaptation. This moment was the culmination of one process where the World Resources Institute and the International Institute for Environment and Development consulted with a large number of organizations from around the world to arrive at these tenets for localizing processes of adapting to climate change. But it was also the beginning of another process, one that is aimed at ensuring that these principles are effectively operationalized to ensure that those who are on the front lines of the battle against climate change are empowered to lead processes of adaptation or really engaging with the impacts of climate change. By signing these principles, organizations have committed to work towards ensuring devolved decision making within processes of climate adaptation, addressing structural inequalities, providing patient and predictable funding to the lowest possible level, investing in local capabilities and the development of institutions at the local level, building a robust understanding of climate risk, enabling flexible programming and learning, ensuring transparency and collaborative action. I'm delighted to have with us today Heather Magre, Director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, Christina Dengel, Knowledge Management Officer with the Adaptation Fund, Vincent Ganey, Climate Resilience Advisor with the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, Saranjana Gupta, Advisor on Community Resilience with the Hueru Commission. Saranjana will be responding to what each of our speakers say and really exploring whether what she's heard is likely to deliver an impact on the lives of local communities on the ground. I will host the first interview, but then the speakers will interview each other just to break out of the usual panel discussion format of podcasts. I'll turn to our first speaker today, Heather. Tell us in a sentence or two about what your organization, the CRGF, does. Thanks, Aditya. The Climate Justice Resilience Fund is a grant making initiative that pulls funding from three different private foundations. And over the last four years, we've programmed about 16 million U.S. dollars. We make grants to support women and youth and Indigenous peoples in building and sharing their own solutions for climate resilience. Our grants help communities build the power and voice and resources that they need to adapt and thrive in a warming climate. Great. So tell us a little bit about what about these principles was attractive to the CJRF? Why did you sign and endorse these? Yeah, so for us, people really need to be at the heart of any lasting solution to the climate crisis. We believe that igniting large-scale change starts with community-level action working from the grassroots to the global level. So these principles create an opportunity to really build momentum and build a community of funders and of others working along with these same principles that really the funding and the power and the ideas, the solution set, need to come from the local level. Now, Heather, tell us a little bit about the actions that you have signed up to for bringing these principles to life. What is it that your organization is going to do and do differently from what it was doing before? We are fortunate that the opportunity to endorse these principles came up just right around the same time we were completing a midterm evaluation of our portfolio. And so there was a number of recommendations in that evaluation that actually aligned nicely with these principles and enable us to make some specific changes in our work in order to realize these principles. So for example, on the question of structural inequalities, our grant-making in general aims to help women and youth and Indigenous peoples address these inequalities, including through advocacy and movement-building and leadership development. We are implementing some new grant-making right now that really emphasized that movement-building and leadership component working from the local to the global. In addition, we actually have been supporting an anti-racism training series for a number of our grantee partners and for our own staff as a way to really live into some of this aspiration for structural change. And one of the things we committed to also was to offer a number of small grants for participants in that training to really build upon what they've learned and to build structural change into their own work. We're also really committed to evolving into a more patient and more predictable funding modality. And so this year, we're planning to streamline several of our administrative processes. For example, we're moving many of our partners to flexible or general support grants where we can. And this should allow them to respond more flexibly to new opportunities and emergencies. We're also implementing a simplified budget template. So these are some of the new actions that we're taking. Heather, another question that I heard from you is that in the age of the Jeff Bezos and the McKinsey Scots and the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffetts and the Rockefeller Foundations of the World, philanthropic or funders are becoming more and more important. You're a part of that really vital constellation that supports action on climate change. What would you say to convince other philanthropic donors to also sign up and endorse these principles for locally led adaptation? I've remind people, first of all, that initiating large scale systems change really starts at the ground level. And these principles are one way to move grant making more in the direction of sparking that kind of profound locally driven transformation. Secondly, I'd also say that these are not just principles about adaptation. Much of what is in the principles is highly aligned with principles of effective philanthropy more broadly. So this represents an opportunity in the climate adaptation space to work on changes that are much needed in philanthropy anyway, and which we know are important for making philanthropy more impactful. This is a way to do that this year with a community of others who are committed to similar actions. Great, thank you. So Ranjana. OK, so with CJRF, I really appreciated their commitment to promoting patient and predictable financing for locally led adaptation in the future and the idea that they'd like to give out more general grants, which are flexible to local organization. But I believe that private philanthropists have a very special place in the climate finance architecture. They're able to take on more risk support, more innovation. They are more agile, perhaps, than other kinds of climate finance institutions led by government. And so I'd like to see them playing a more bold role in terms of engaging and educating other climate finance institutions and really revisiting some of the basic principles of how climate finance is being done and how the entire architecture of climate finance needs to change. Great, so Heather, now back to you to interview Vincent. Sure, thank you. Vincent, good afternoon. Good afternoon. I wonder if you can take just a couple of seconds to tell us about the FCDO and what it does and how it works. Yes, thank you very much, Heather, and thank you, Aditya. And the FCDO is the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom government. We came about last year. Many people will know Difford, the Department for International Development and last August, the Department for International Development and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office were merged into a single organization, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. And we lead on the UK policy and investments in foreign policy. So we are the UK department that leads on foreign policy and we are also the UK department that leads on investments in international development, guided by the International Development Act of 2015. So we're the frontline in the UK government for international development support and delivery. Thank you. Can you tell us why the FCDO decided to endorse the principles of both the lead adaptation? Indeed. So our support for this is really multifaceted and it comes from a combination of wanting to build on experience from successful investments in adaptation and resilience, but also being very forward-looking and particular in support of the least developed countries group at the UNFCCC and their 2050 vision, which aims to move the dial on access and management and targeting of climate finance with a particular target that 70% of that finance will support local level actions by 2030. In the past, we've supported a range of adaptation resilience programs which have piloted enhanced support for local level action. And they include the prior braced program, which was building resilience and adaptation to climate extremes and disasters that closed in 2019. And that supported a whole range of local actions in Africa and Asia. For example, the decentralized climate finance model in West African Sahel, supported communities in Senegal and Mali to become resilient to climate change through access to local controlled adaptation funds. And programs in Kenya led to the establishment of county climate change funds in Wajir County and Arid County in Northeast Kenya, which has now been replicated in other counties of Kenya. So we've seen therefore that support for local action is viable in practice and produces positive results for local communities who are the most adversely affected by climate change. And since the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 and the call for action that came out of that, the UK has been working closely with the Global Commission on Adaptation, the World Resources Institute and IAED on supporting the eight action tracks that came out of that climate summit, one of which was the locally led action track. We've been supporting that since 2019. We particularly welcome the inclusiveness of the principles which address structural inequalities faced by women, youth, disabled and excluded groups. And this chimes well with our only approach to inclusive support for women and girls and disabled groups and also the focus on climate risk analysis that fits with quite a lot of other of our programming like the risk informed early action partnership and the weather and climate information services for Africa program. So following all of that endorsement to the principles was actually quite a logical progression. So building upon all that knowledge and experience and linking with support forward support to the LDC vision is our primary driver in supporting the LLA principles. Terrific. Can you tell us in a little more detail what specific actions FCDO is planning to take in order to operationalize the principles? Certainly. The UK has committed to this vision by signing the Life AR Partnership Compact at COP25 in Madrid in December 19. And that supported the LDC vision and that we also then went ahead of that and committed financial support to the LDC initiative for effective adaptation resilience which is known as Life AR. And we're working now closely with seven front runner countries to help them realize their LDC vision for delivering climate finance to support local level action by 2030 with a view to scaling up this program to represent nearly one billion of the world's poorest people by 2030. And support for this Life AR initiative will blaze the trail for others and moving from business as usual to what they call business unusual which aims to deliver climate finance much closer to the point where it's needed and is most effective. However, the dial's not yet moved on this sufficiently and our predecessor organization DIFID in the past supported a whole range of local NGOs and CBOs for a long time through many funding mechanisms. But this wasn't based on a deliberate strategic approach and support for the LLA and incorporating the LLA approach will help us make this a more strategic and deliberately strategic approach to move forward on. And we're also working to embed locally led approaches to adaptation through our internal resource allocation at the moment and see the LLA as potentially guiding a wide range of future UK investment decisions. Finally, I was wondering really what will keep FCBO accountable for these actions you've described and can you tell us how grassroots actors and other organizations might be able to support that accountability? Well, we recognize that the principles require both upward and downward accountability. So this requires donors such as FCDO to demonstrate accountability to the grassroots in the way that the programs are designed and the way that committed funds are spent. And for example, for Life AR, the principle is very much LDC ownership and leadership with the development partners like FCDO playing a supportive and catalytic role. And therefore, by ceding greater control, to least develop countries for program design and establishment of targets and milestones and reaching a common agreement with those countries to fund on that basis. While I stress continuing to sort our right of accountability towards our own UK taxpayers, this allows a much more collegial and less donor driven approach to program design and delivery. And this also allows the LDCs to track donor support and have them to use that to keep the key stakeholders and their countries informed as to delivery of this commitment. And again, in the BRACE program I referred to in the past, we experimented with various novel approaches to greater engagement of local organizations and program monitoring and learning. These are still very much in their infancy and not yet, I suppose, tried and trusted with major institutional donors, but we're very open to exploring approaches that integrate participant monitoring of the delivery of programs, which include qualitative approaches like storytelling or non-formal monitoring to track progress. And we'll explore during the program design process how grassroots organizations can be part of that monitoring process rather than simply being pleased by it. Thank you. So that was very encouraging from FCBO and it's good to see that they're drawing on their history of supporting grassroots organizations, CBOs and civil society in the least developed countries in the past and building on that to look at how they're going to support the locally-led adaptation principles. And particularly interesting, of course, is their support for the LDC vision and the LDC group. But I'm wondering how they will actually track how money is flowing down to the local level from national governments, being based in an organization that works with many grassroots groups, we find that even the national governments are very distant and inaccessible to locally-focused organizations. We're going to hold your responses to Sranjana till the end. So I think it's over to you, Vincent, for interviewing Christina. Indeed. So Christina, good day and welcome to this podcast and representing the Adaptation Fund. Can you tell us a little bit to start with about what the Adaptation Fund does and what it supports? Yes, thank you, Vincent, and good morning from Washington. Well, the Adaptation Fund was set up by the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the so-called UN FCCC. And it's a small and nimble fund that finances projects and programs that help vulnerable communities in developing countries build resilience and also adapt to climate change. The fund was the one to pioneer the Direct Access Modality through which national entities or organizations have access to international climate funds directly without having to go through intermediaries. To date, the fund has a total of 113 concrete projects and programs that are currently under implementation, including regional projects, and they cover different sectors spanning from disaster risk reduction, food security, agriculture, to ecosystem-based adaptation and also multi-sector projects. Thank you, Christina. So why did the Adaptation Fund endorse the principles for LLA? You're one of the 40 original organizations. So can you tell us a bit about your rationale for endorsement? Well, the Adaptation Fund has really been supporting local actions since it became operational in 2010. As I mentioned before, it pioneered this Direct Access Modality that includes measures that promote the involvement of local level actors and communities in planning but also in the implementation of the proposed adaptation interventions. It also pioneered the Enhanced Direct Access Modality, which really is a modality that further devolves decision-making of international climate funds to the subnational level. So the way this works in practice under the EDA is that the screening, review, and selection of projects is done at the national and subnational level with strong stakeholder and community engagement in the decision-making of the proposed adaptation interventions at those levels. In addition to this, our environmental and social policy plays a key role in guiding global inclusion in project formulation and throughout the project cycle implementation by reinforcing existing requirements of meaningful consultation with all intended stakeholders and communities at the adaptation site. And finally, the Fund has recently released an in-depth study highlighting project successes and lessons learned in locally led action which shows further commitment to this topic. So in essence, for us, endorsing the principles meant a reaffirmation of continuing the work of supporting local actions. Well, thank you, Christina. And I mean, you've partly answered the next question, but I'd like to see if you can elaborate a little more about the actions that you've actually signed up to for further operationalizing the principles. Of course, as I mentioned, all AF concrete adaptation projects fund local level investments, they're designed with the active participation of the communities they benefit for. More recently, a set of additional measures were put in place to expand the support to local level actors. And one of them were efforts to enhance the number, but also the capacities of these national implementing entities or organizations that can directly access funds, but as well as help build capacity with other small local level entities. The second one was piloting the enhanced direct access modality, which I mentioned before, the screening and review and selection of project is done at the subnational level. And maybe more importantly is was the launch of the adaptation fund climate innovation accelerator called the AFSIA, which is really a funding opportunity aimed at fostering innovation of adaptation practices in vulnerable countries at the local level. So under this AFSIA, non-governmental organizations or community groups or young innovators or women's groups or grassroots organization or what have you have access to these funding opportunities on a competitive basis without actually having to seek accreditation with the adaptation fund. So without actually having to go through this rigorous accreditation process that we have. So these are like in a nutshell, the new measures that we have taken since we brought the principles. Well, thank you so much. That was really interesting. Final question, if you don't mind, I see a critical challenge was ensuring that local voice is truly representative of local communities. It's too easy to hijack that voice by people with greater power and influence. So how do you see that the LLA can support genuine local voices and make it a genuine inclusive process rather than something that is not really representative of local communities? Yes, so as I mentioned before, our project review procedures through the ESP environmental and social policies include requirements for a meaningful stakeholder consultation at the project design phase. So what does this mean? So that the actually affected communities, including the project intervention, need to be consulted in a meaningful way. And the project proponents need to present to the fund actual consultation reports where the voices and views of these consulting groups are clearly presented and the outcomes. So these have to be reflected then in the design of the project. We also measure these outcomes of the proposed actions and interventions through the project performance reports that national entities are required to present to us on an annual basis, which we review and then clear. But in more general terms, I think that all trainings and capacity building events done at the local level need to be done in a meaningful way. So that is to have all training capacity building materials or awareness raising materials done in simple formats, ideally in languages of the local communities. And why not not necessarily in a written format but could also be through storytelling or videos? Thank you, Christina. That was very interesting. I think from my point of view, I see that the pioneering work that the Adaptation Fund has done on direct access sort of needs to take the next step and they need to share the lessons learned with other entities that are close to local level actors and can access resources that flow to local level actors who can then drive adaptation locally. That was one thing. And I mean, I'm not sure with the Adaptation Fund if I'm hearing any new activities that they're going to take on to operationalize their commitment to the locally led adaptation principles, I feel like it's more around expanding and growing what they're already doing. Wonderful. That was really stimulating and interesting. Thank you all for asking the questions and answering the questions. In this final segment of the podcast, we're gonna give our speakers a chance to respond to Suranjan Agukta who commented on whether she felt what she heard from them was going to deliver impact on the ground. Heather, Suranjan Agukta thinks a philanthropist should be bolder and should also take on the task of educating other climate finance actors. What's your response? Yes, thanks very much, Suranjan Agukta. This is an important question and something I confess we haven't fully figured out as the CDRF but one opportunity that I see is a partnership that we've been helping to spearhead called the Frontline Funds Accelerator and we would welcome, for example, the experience of the adaptation fund to be shared within this partnership to really bring in some of the lessons learned because this is a group we're working with and it includes a number of you here on this call, IID and Hyro Commission but we are working to bring together folks from a number of different sectors, the grassroots, the international development space, philanthropy, a think tank, together to work on exactly this agenda and I think there's some real opportunities in this kind of collaboration where we're building outside of our strict silos to do something that takes a little more time, might be less predictable but in the long run, may be a bolder opportunity to shift the architecture. Christina, do jump in here, respond to Heather on her request for learning and sharing more about what the Adaptation Fund is doing but also respond to what Suranjan had to say about your remarks. Is the Adaptation Fund doing something that is different as a result of signing up to the principles or is it the beginning of a journey for the fund? Sure, I'll be happy to respond to that question. So essentially knowledge management and learning are very important at the fund and it's really embedded throughout our policies and procedures in our projects and in fact, in the last few years, we've produced a number of publications looking at lessons learned and best practices from around different sectors and themes, we've produced a publication on gender mainstreaming in our projects including case studies from our portfolio. We've had as well a publication on LLA looking at how this was embedded from the beginning in our projects and again with the concrete case studies, these publications and many others. There's another one that we have on our readiness program and of course we do share these widely with our stakeholders online. We participated in international events around LLA where we share the findings of our study but of course we also look forward to contributing rather with other funds such as Heather's fund. Another, let's say knowledge tool that we put out there was an e-learning course that is aimed at natural implementing entities but not only to actually learn about our accreditation process and maybe what's more important for community organizations nowadays to look at our procedures and policies at the project design and implementation phase where we actually have concrete examples and case studies from our portfolio. These again have been widely distributed and this may also be important for the second part of the question I'm gonna answer on the new things that we've done. Sanjata, for the first time, like I mentioned we launched this climate innovation accelerator which is really a funding opportunity available to non accredited entities. So they're available to community organizations to women's groups, even to small private sector to young innovators to access funds from us directly without having to go through the accreditation process which is really a first time action, let's say the adaptation fund. I hope this answered both questions. So Ranjina, does it? Has the climate innovation accelerator given out money so far? Yes, so the climate accelerator is run through an aggregator composed of UNDP and UNEP and the first call for proposals took place in February of this year and I believe the second one will take place in August. But it's announced both on our website and on the UNDP and UNEP website. So it's still to fund any project? Well, the first proposals have come in and I think they're in the project of reviewing these grants. All right, thank you. It was just launched in January of this year. Vincent, although to you, you heard what Ranjina had to say about your answers to Heather's questions, do you have a rebuttal? I think I've stressed in my earlier answer that this is very much a least-developed country's lead on this, that the UK is stepping back a bit and saying that the least-developed countries have come to us with a vision and a way of working and we're agreeing to support that in their initial phases with a view over 10 years to start supporting up to 1 billion people around the world. So we're making baby steps in the first instance and we're actually all learning together as we go forward because these approaches are new to us. They're not traditional business as usual for us. We are learning ourselves what business unusual means. So we are used to supporting national level governments. We are used to supporting local organizations but we haven't done that in a strategic joined up way yet. So we put money through line ministries, for example, and we leave it up to the line ministries to make those decisions or we put money directly through local NGOs. But I think this process is actually trying to build the links. It's trying to build the bottom up links from bottom to top and the top down links. So the climate finance ministries who are controlling climate finance who are delivering on the basis of a demand led approach coming up from the bottom. And at the moment, we don't have the silver bullet for that. This is a process that we will learn together over the next few years and we will be guided by local organizations who are telling us whether it's working for them and we'll make this an adaptive program so that we're being flexible in the way that we're learning and responding. We've also certainly the tracking the delivery to local level as well is something that we've also got to learn more about. I mean, again, donors have traditionally been very top down about this. We're accountable to our taxpayers. Therefore, we expect local organizations to report to us on a regular basis with quite detailed reports about expenditure so that we can report back and we can be audited, et cetera, et cetera, so that we can be seen to be accountable. This is turning the tables on that a bit. This is saying, yes, we still have to do that as the UK taxpayer in our case is the one supporting these initiatives. But also we recognize that the principles are telling us to be expect accountability for the way that we spend money as well. So these structures that will allow us to track money to local action is allowing the local participants, the local partners to come back to us and be an integral part of that monitoring process. And again, I can't say I don't have, I don't have the model in my back pocket. This is something that we will work out over the next few years as to how this should be effectively delivered because business unusual means that we haven't done it before. Business unusual means that we're all learning together. So we've got to move from that business as usual approach and learn in that process as well. Does that answer your question, Surajana? Yes, it does. And do you see UK's cop presidency as an opportunity to really champion the locally led action adaptation principles and sort of have these conversations and promote these ideas more with other national government? Certainly. I mean, again, we'll work with the countries that are most affected. The UK is already working on adaptation resilience with the least developed country group or working with the small island developing states. And we're also continuing to support the locally led action track that came out of the Global Commission on Adaptation. We'll continue to support the development and the further refining of that through COP26 so that we're on the same page to move forward on this together. And it's certainly a commitment from within FCDO to take that forward to COP26 and beyond. That was wonderful. Any final burning questions or thoughts that any of you have? Well, I really appreciated people at the Financial Institution commitments to the locally led adaptation principles and their solid intentions to really make them work on the ground. And also the way in which people are saying, well, we don't have all the answers, but we're ready to learn. And what I'd like to see is that over the next six months, one year and the next and the coming few years, we find opportunities to bring together local institutions and climate finance institutions to have a dialogue about the intentions of financial institutions, the ways in which they're operationalizing the locally led adaptation principles and how these are actually working on the ground for locally focused grassroots communities and local governments. So that then this becomes a really exciting collaborative endeavor where we can actually figure out what will work and what won't work and find solutions together. So Ranjana, Heather, Vincent, Christina, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts. We of course will continue to work together as a community of practice to bring the locally led adaptation principles to life. Do tune in for our next podcast that is sharply focused on exploring methods and approaches for tracking progress with these principles and exploring ways in which we as a community of practice working to bring them to life can learn from each other.