What is Locally Led Climate Action?

Locally led climate action (LLCA) puts those actors on the frontlines of climate change–communities, local governments, Indigenous Peoples, and civil society groups–in the position to drive the response to climate change.

At the World Bank, we are advancing LLCA with an operational approach that practitioners can use to design national scale projects that enable locally led efforts for climate adaptation and mitigation. This approach works through the Bank’s existing partnerships with countries to create enduring institutional changes and build the capacities needed across all levels of government and society for local leadership on climate action.

LLCA builds from the work of organizations like the Global Commission on Adaptation, IIED, and WRI and presents a streamlined and systematic approach to project design and implementation that can lead to greater consistency and comparability. Differing from related approaches, the World Bank’s LLCA framework is focused on both mitigation and adaptation, and leveraging national-level partnerships to create the enabling conditions for local leadership to flourish.

The approach centers on the incorporation of three design features across projects to ensure systemization. These features are as follows:

(1) Subsidiarity, and an emphasis devolving power to, and strengthening the capacity of the lowest appropriate level for governing the climate challenge;

(2) Participation, inclusion, and empowerment of communities for climate action; and

(3) Climate-informed investment: Alignment of investments with the best available climate science and existing climate priorities.

Through these design features, LLCA can lead to strengthened government systems for climate transitions, increased transparency and accountability over climate action, improved coordination and circulation of climate information across sectors and levels of government, more inclusive local participation and decision making on climate change, and greater integration of local knowledge to support more sustainable implementation of climate policies.

As an operational approach, it is anticipated that the guidance on LLCA will evolve overtime in response to insights from application. LLCA should therefore be regarded as a living and dynamic approach that can be expected to evolve over time.