Beyond coproduction: A case study in direct funding to advance community-led resilience

Knowledge-based actors in academic institutions and government agencies
increasingly apply coproduction to build the resilience and adaptive
capacity of frontline communities. However, coproduced climate adaptation
outputs are predominantly technical, scientific, or data products.
Frontline communities often seek more practical outputs aimed at immediate
resilience priorities. In this paper, we describe our community grants
program, which provided direct funding to frontline community-based
organizations, as an illustrative case study 1) to expand knowledge of
what community-led climate resilience means and its impact in practical
terms, and 2) to build understanding of the opportunities and limitations
of direct funding for advancing climate resilience. We analyze project
proposals and post-project semi-structured interviews to increase
understanding of what frontline community-based organizations mean by
resilience and how they approach that work. Our findings indicate that
direct funding can ignite resilience at the local level and enhance trust
building between knowledge-based actors and frontline communities. But
direct funding is a resource intensive process and fundamentally focuses
on making a difference on the ground in specific locations. We conclude,
first, that academic institutions and government agencies need to take
frontline communities and their resilience priorities seriously. And
funding community-led initiatives is one impactful way to ensuring
localized resilience impacts. Second, direct funding of community-led
resilience initiatives is an important pathway for the adaptation field to
broaden its conception of climate adaptation and have a local impact. And
third, university- and government-based researchers can play an important
role by assisting frontline community-based organizations achieve their
resilience objectives and scaling out and up that work.