The Role of Local Governance and Institutions in Livelihoods Adaptation to Climate Change

The most important implications of climate change from the perspective of the World Bank concern its potentially disastrous impacts on the prospects for development, especially for poorer populations in the global South. Earlier writings on climate change had tended to focus more on its links with biodiversity loss, spread of pathogens and diseases, land use planning, ecosystem change, and insurance markets, rather than its connections with development (Easterling and Apps 2005, Harvell et al. 2002, Tompkins and Adger 2004). But as the Social Development Department of the World Bank recently noted, “Climate change is the defining development challenge of our generation” (SDV, 2007: 2). These words echo the World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s statement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2007 in Bali where he called climate change a “development, economic, and investment challenge.” Indeed, understanding the relationship between climate change, the human responses it necessitates, and how institutions shape such responses is an increasingly urgent need. This report directs attention towards a subset of such relationships, focusing on rural institutions and poor populations in the context of climate variability and change-induced adaptations.