Locally led climate resilience for extreme climate vulnerability

REPORT

Locally-led Climate Action in the Global South

Learning from Communities

19 February, 2026 | Climate Resilience

Ishita Gupta, Lalitha Ramalingan, Taveri Rajkhowa, Aryan Bajpai, Vanya Pandey, Shreya Wadhawan

Suggested Citation: Gupta, Ishita, Lalitha Ramalingan, Taveri Rajkhowa, Aryan Bajpai, Vanya Pandey and Shreya Wadhawan. 2026. Locally-led Climate Action in the Global South: Learning from Communities. New Delhi, India: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

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Annexure

Compendium Annexure

Overview

Climate impacts are felt most acutely at the local level, yet climate action in India and across the Global South remains largely designed and financed through centralised, top-down systems. This limits local ownership, relevance, and the long-term sustainability of adaptation efforts, particularly for climate-vulnerable populations. Local institutions often face constrained decision-making authority, fragmented and unpredictable finance, limited technical capacity, and inadequate access to climate information, alongside weak inclusion of marginalised groups, resulting in short-term and poorly aligned interventions.

This study examines how locally led climate action (LLCA) can be operationalised and scaled in India through governance, institutional, and financial reforms. It reviews 75 community-based initiatives across 16 countries and documents 16 in-depth case studies to identify best practices for building climate resilience. For India, the study bridges local action with national ambitions by identifying systemic barriers and opportunities to shift from fragmented pilots to institutionalised, scalable models for resilience-building. Drawing on evidence from multilateral climate funds and national programmes, the study highlights three core design features for effective operationalisation of LLCA:

i.) devolved finance and decision-making,
ii.) inclusive and accountable local leadership, and
iii.) climate-informed local planning that integrates scientific and indigenous knowledge.

Evidence from South Asia shows that empowering community institutions, such as women’s groups, indigenous communities, and youth collectives, enables cross-sector coordination and sustains long-term resilience.

Key findings and recommendations

To strengthen inclusive governance, climate planning must account for community needs and co-create contextually relevant solutions that formalise traditional knowledge, local leadership, and sustained capacity-building efforts.
To effectively manage climate risk, climate data must be downscaled and made readily accessible at the local level to enable monitoring and evaluation, and establish feedback mechanisms to address differentiated vulnerability.
To channel timely funds through effective horizontal and vertical coordination, ensuringdownward accountability and strengthened fiscal subsidiarity is a must
To enable systemic change, implementation partners, funders, and local governments need to reimagine traditional project cycles and timelines to incorporate iterative, ‘learning-by-doing’ processes.

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Ishita Gupta

Research Analyst

ishita.gupta@ceew.in

“Communities are not just passive recipients, but knowledge holders, innovators, and frontline risk managers whose lived experiences and adaptive practices are critical for designing effective and sustainable climate solutions. Recognising and strengthening this agency, and empowering local communities, is critical to determining where and how resources are deployed, central to building accountable systems and realising the full potential for strengthening climate resilience.”

Executive summary

As climate impacts intensify across the Global South, the need to shift from centralised adaptation planning to locally driven climate action has become even more critical. Although global frameworks have advanced adaptation agendas, implementation remains fragmented, underfinanced, and insufficiently rooted in the lived realities of climate-vulnerable populations. This compendium on locally-led climate action (LLCA) consolidates global experience, identifies best practices, and outlines operational pathways for India and other developing countries to institutionalise community-led resilience within governance, finance, and planning systems.

Climate change impacts manifest locally, yet most adaptation efforts continue to be driven through centralised, top-down systems. Traditional community-based adaptation (CBA) initiatives enabled local participation but largely positioned communities as beneficiaries. As a result, these interventions only yielded sporadic, short-lived success, and humanitarian and project-based support rarely evolved into lasting capacity or institutional resilience.

Locally-led adaptation (LLA) marked a pivotal transition by embedding decentralisation and long-term capacity building into adaptation practice. Guided by the eight LLA principles, this approach sought to strengthen policy and institutional frameworks to enable sustained local-level interventions. However, challenges in scaling and replication limited its impact.

The LLCA framework builds on LLA by connecting disaggregated local efforts and operationalising adaptation at national and sub-national scales. It provides a practical pathway to design, plan, and implement local adaptation through three core features:

Subsidiarity in finance: placing funds and authority in the hands of local actors
Inclusive governance and participation: ensuring that marginalised communities are central to decision-making
Climate-informed local planning: combining scientific data with indigenous and traditional knowledge

Source: World Bank. 2024. Locally-Led Climate Action: A World Bank Operational Approach.

Purpose and audience of the compendium

This compendium consolidates lessons from over 75 LLCA-aligned initiatives across the Global South, offering a practical reference for policymakers, practitioners, funders, and community leaders.

For policymakers, it identifies reforms and integration pathways for existing schemes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGS), National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), and Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY).
For funders and donors, it demonstrates credible and scalable approaches to channel finance directly to local actors.
For practitioners and civil society, it outlines tested models to strengthen leadership, partnerships, and resilience measurement at the grassroots level.

Overall, the compendium positions LLCA as the next frontier for advancing India’s climate resilience and highlights viable strategies for translating global best practices into India’s policy and institutional contexts.

Research approach and methodology

To ensure credibility and rigour, the study reviewed over 75 projects from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Green Climate Fund (GCF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) across 16 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania.

Projects were evaluated against indicators derived from the eight LLA principles and assessed using criteria such as community engagement, on-ground implementation, and scalability.

The analysis also highlights structural bottlenecks that constrain LLCA implementation in India, including rigid financing channels, participation that remains more symbolic than substantive, and limited use of localised climate information.

Emerging good practices from the Global South

Global experiences demonstrate how LLCA principles translate into measurable resilience outcomes:

Brazil: Community-led mangrove conservation has strengthened coastal protection and safeguarded livelihoods.
Zimbabwe: Climate risk management initiatives have improved food security for vulnerable households.

These examples illustrate the tangible benefits of subsidiarity, inclusivity, and locally grounded planning. The compendium distils such insights across the three LLCA design features, offering a consolidated set of good practices that can inform national- and state-level adaptation strategies.

Lessons, recommendations, and call to action

The analysis yields actionable recommendations for embedding LLCA within India’s adaptation ecosystem:

Finance reforms

Simplify access to sectoral and scheme-based funds for adaptation
Institutionalise participatory budget planning and social audits to ensure transparency and accountability.

Governance reforms

Ensure meaningful representation of marginalised groups beyond formal compliance.
Strengthen local leadership through gram panchayats, self-help groups (SHGs), and user collectives to support inclusive participation.

Robust data systems

Develop granular, vernacular, and locally accessible climate datasets.
Ensure timely data dissemination to enable risk-informed decision-making at the community level.

The compendium calls for a systemic shift from small-scale pilots to mainstreamed LLCA, and from communities as beneficiaries to co-leaders of India’s climate transition. Achieving this requires reimagining how local interventions can be aggregated and adapted to scale while preserving their local character.

It serves as an actionable reference for national and state governments, development agencies, and grassroots organisations to reform policies, scale up proven LLCA models, and embed local climate resilience in India’s governance, financing, and planning systems. The insights will feed into a broader study on operationalising LLCA in India and ultimately contribute to a framework for institutionalising local resilience in national policy and practice.

FAQs

What does this compendium present on locally led climate action in the Global South?

The compendium brings together examples from across the Global South where community-based climate actions have been implemented. It demonstrates how solutions become locally led when they are inclusive, context-responsive, and supported by decision-making authority with the people facing climate risk. It synthesises lessons for India and other countries to show what systemic-level changes are needed to operationalise locally led climate action and build climate resilience.
Why is LLCA important for strengthening climate resilience in the Global South?

Climate change impacts are experienced locally, yet most adaptation efforts continue to be designed and delivered through centralised, top-down systems. Traditional community-based adaptation (CBA) created space for participation but largely treated communities as beneficiaries rather than decision-makers. The LLCA approach addresses this gap by proposing an operational pathway to devolve financial and governing authority to local institutions and communities, enabling them to shape priorities, make decisions, and lead implementation to address risks induced by climate change.
Who is this compendium intended for?

The compendium is intended for policymakers, state and district administrators, development practitioners, and research organisations working on climate governance, rural development, and resilience planning. Guided by the eight principles of locally led adaptation, the study provides insights into institutional, financial, and planning reforms that can inform policy design, strengthen programme architecture, and shape investment decisions where local actors take the lead in shaping priorities, accessing relevant climate information, and managing resources with autonomy to enable bottom-up climate action.