Commitments in the international policy and climate finance arenas have increasingly prioritised addressing climate change adaptation, particularly in the use of activities established under the mechanisms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Accordingly, climate change adaptive capacity and resilience enhancing activities directed at addressing adaptation have increased, with activities established under international donor and agency programming, and national government plans, shaped under international policy and funding channels.

How this increase in climate financing at the global scale, translates then, into locally targeted climate change adaptation programming, merits further attention. One key approach being taken to address climate change adaptation, has been through adaptive capacity and resilience enhancing activities undertaken at local community or village levels. In Indonesia, a host of climate change adaptation programming is supplied by international development institutions, and financing channels, rather than through local-level institutions and organisations. Most of this programming is geared towards on the ground activities, as village-level targeted interventions centered on building local climate adaptive capacities.

Globally, limited attention has been given to how climate finance and internationally developed climate adaptation programmes translate into interventions directed specifically at instilling local community climate resilience and adaptive capacity. Less attention has been paid, to the rendering of adaptation interventions in Indonesia, positioned within international aid and development, and translated via various avenues, into the resource governance practices of small rural village communities to enhance climate resilience and adaptive capacity.

This proposed thesis, is therefore concerned with the formation and transition of climate change adaptation programming from origins determined under climate finance and international policy mechanisms, for translation into climate adaptation projects implemented at local village scales. The research undertaken for this thesis taken from case studies of climate change adaptation projects, is aimed at understanding the implications involved in implementing internationally devised or influenced climate change adaptation policy objectives and programming, as adaptation interventions at village community levels. This research therefore applies a grounded theory approach to elicit insights from two village case studies into how locally-targeted climate change adaptation programming interventions developed and financed under international mechanisms, mutually interact, influence, alter and are altered by, the local resource governance systems of rural village communities, in intervening to enhance climate adaptive capacity.

This seminar will be presented by ANU PhD student Skye Turner-Walker as her mid-term review seminar.