Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) is key in increasing the resilience of communities while shifting power and decision making away from financiers and intermediaries.

The eight Principles for LLA, launched in January 2021, have since been endorsed by over 100 institutions, including governments, multilateral institutions, community-based organizations and civil society. Private sector endorsements have been fewer but hold great promise for the future.

 1. Devolving decision making to the lowest appropriate level:

Giving local institutions and communities more direct access to finance and decision-making power over how adaptation actions are defined, prioritized, designed, implemented; how progress is monitored; and how success is evaluated.

2. Addressing structural inequalities faced by women, youth, children, disabled, displaced, Indigenous Peoples and marginalised ethnic groups: 

Integrating gender-based, economic, and political inequalities that are root causes of vulnerability into the core of adaptation action and encouraging vulnerable and marginalized individuals to meaningfully participate in and lead adaptation decisions.

3. Providing patient and predictable funding that can be accessed more easily:

Supporting long-term development of local governance processes, capacity, and institutions through simpler access modalities and longer term and more predictable funding horizons, to ensure that communities can effectively implement adaptation actions.

4. Investing in local capabilities to leave an institutional legacy:

Improving the capabilities of local institutions to ensure they can understand climate risks and uncertainties, generate solutions, and facilitate and manage adaptation initiatives over the long term without being dependent on project based donor funding.

5. Building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty: 

Informing adaptation decisions through a combination of local, traditional, Indigenous, generational and scientific knowledge that can enable resilience under a range of future climate scenarios.

6. Flexible programming and learning: 

Enabling adaptive management to address the inherent uncertainty in adaptation, especially through robust monitoring and learning systems, flexible finance, and flexible programming.

7. Ensuring transparency and accountability:

Making processes of financing, designing, and delivering programs more transparent and accountable downward to local stakeholders.

8. Collaborative action and investment:

Collaboration across sectors, initiatives and levels to ensure that different initiatives and different sources of funding (humanitarian assistance, development, disaster risk reduction, green recovery funds, etc.) support each other, and their activities avoid duplication, to enhance efficiencies and good practice.