In test for World Bank, success of new climate fund hinges on serious community engagement

COP 28’s commitment to operationalise the Loss and Damage Fund to help countries in the Global South deal with their increasing exposure to climate impacts and the threat these pose to their social and economic well-being counts as relatively good news. If donors provide adequate resources, which remains uncertain, success will depend on whether the World Bank, which will host the new fund, is able to ensure that the views and concerns of the communities most affected by the climate crisis are given proper weight in deciding which programs to support and how to implement them.  

We see plenty of references to the importance of more inclusive approaches to climate action in existing instruments such as the Green Climate Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Global Goal on Adaptation. Unfortunately, the reality on the ground for poor and marginalized communities in the hardest-hit areas suggests that commitments to engage with communities are largely hollow.  

A 2022 survey conducted by Ground Truth Solutions, in collaboration with the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), found that communities in Bangladesh do not feel they are getting the support they need. We spoke with more than 2,300 Bangladeshis in highly climate-vulnerable areas, and most of them told us that aid providers are delivering the wrong type of climate programming. “What they do doesn’t help much,” said one female community leader in Sirajganj Pourashaba, in the north of the country. “People don’t want any more rice and lentils. There is no more land to live on.” 

Fig.1 GTS survey locations, Bangladesh, July 2022

Our conversations revealed that people feel left out of decisions affecting their lives and often hesitate to speak up for fear of reprisal. “We’ve expressed our views so many times,” one man in the southwestern district of Shyamnagar told us, “but no-one acts on what we say.” Complaining about the status quo, however, can be dangerous. “If we make a fuss,” another man told us, “we may end up with nothing.”

The prevailing, top-down, approach to designing climate interventions means that scarce resources often get spent on the wrong things—on short-term food aid when long-term agricultural solutions are what’s required, for instance, or only on flood defenses when extreme heat is also causing huge problems. Many projects benefit one part of a community while excluding others, thereby undermining precious social cohesion.

Policymakers at COPs tend to make lofty claims about ensuring that communities are in the driver’s seat, but too often such promises aren’t borne out in practice. And calls for climate justice that focus only on governments and don’t put the needs and priorities of affected people front and center offer no justice at all.

Conversations we’ve had in Bangladesh with representatives of local government and aid officials outside the capital underline the myriad challenges. Many of them told us that they see the adaptation work they’re doing as insufficiently coordinated, too narrow in scope, and poorly and intermittently funded. “I feel like a cow tied to a rope that can only graze as far as the rope allows,” one local government representative in Shyamnagar district said. While communities expect a lot, in other words, the implementers’ often feel their hands are tied as they try to implement pre-planned projects with limited resources.

Local government and aid officials repeatedly told us that they feel unable to exert influence when it comes to interactions between donors, national governments, and international NGOs. Another problem, they said, stems from donors’ lack of flexibility to change tack in the face of varying and unpredictable conditions. Local officials also expressed frustration with some community members. They blamed what they saw as communities’ resistance to change—whether it comes to adapting new agricultural techniques or sending their children to school rather than to work in shrimp farms—as a form of misguided stubbornness.

Others admitted that they probably could be doing more to ensure that the programs they’re delivering are what communities feel they need. “We rarely engage with communities,” said a local official in the coastal district of Golachipa. As a result, “communities have little sense of ownership or responsibility.” The challenges are made worse, he added, by perfunctory reporting on program implementation, which makes course correction less likely, and by insufficient efforts to reward good practices. “Plans to empower people,” he said, “are mostly aspirational.”

The new loss and damage fund provides an opportunity to learn from the shortcomings of previous climate and disaster responses, and to do more to ensure that, in cases where the need for support has gone beyond adaptation, genuine climate justice is carried out. The starting point for the fund must be to listen actively to the communities in question and to act on what they feel they need to live better lives now and in future.

It may well turn out that the losses and damages that matter most to people are not the ones we think they are. The loss of cultural heritage, for instance, the fallout from social disruption, and the toll on mental and physical health may have more devastating impacts on communities than the destruction of infrastructure like roads and embankments.

If the new fund is to realize its potential, the World Bank must craft the terms and conditions of its grants so that the projects it finances serve and respond to the people for whom they’re meant. Twelve years working on accountability in the humanitarian space, where rhetoric about participation abounds, has taught us how hard this is—and how easy it is for donors and implementers to pretend to put people at the center. But if the World Bank puts the right incentives in place and tracks community views conscientiously over time, the new loss and damage fund could make a big difference to the millions of people negatively affected by our ongoing climate crisis, while also setting an example to other funders who talk of engaging with people at risk but do little about it.  

By Nick van Praag, Founder and Board Director of Ground Truth Solutions