Study: Challenges and prospects of Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA) initiative in Nepal as everyday adaptation (DOI: 10.5751/ES-13630-270428)
Special Feature: Everyday Adaptations to Climate Change
The catastrophic flood along the Nepal-China border that killed more than 1,400 people and left nearly 6,000 people missing devastated communities and infrastructure, and renewed questions about how Himalayan countries prepare for environmental hazards that can unfold rapidly and cross-national borders.
For University of Michigan researcher Rajiv Ghimire, those questions connect to a challenge he has studied in Nepal for years: Climate adaptation may be shaped by national policies and scientific expertise, but ultimately it has to work in the places where people experience environmental change in their everyday lives.
Ghimire, a lecturer at U-M's School for Environment and Sustainability, and Arizona State University's Netra Chhetri examined Nepal's Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPA, to understand how local knowledge can be incorporated into formal climate adaptation, and what happens when communities are given a role in deciding how to respond.
Their study, published in Ecology and Society, suggests that some of the most useful starting points for climate adaptation may already exist within communities. But turning that knowledge into effective policy requires money, institutional support and attention to who gets to participate in local decision-making. This work is also a part of a special feature in progress on Everyday Adaptations to Climate Change, which has a collection of 15 articles that Ghimire contributed as a guest editor.
What communities already know
Nepal introduced LAPA as a way to connect national climate policy with the experiences and priorities of people at the local level.
Ghimire and Chhetri examined 65 local adaptation plans covering 11 districts, interviewed 45 local stakeholders, and spoke with 15 people involved in climate adaptation at the national and regional levels. What they found complicates the idea that adaptation necessarily begins with a new technology or intervention.
Communities identified drought, untimely rainfall, drying water sources, floods and landslides, crop pests and diseases, forest fires and declining agricultural production among the changes affecting their lives. Their responses included improving irrigation, conserving water sources, planting trees, introducing improved seeds and crops, protecting drinking-water systems and changing livestock practices.
But many of those practices were not new.
Seventy-eight percent of local respondents said the adaptation activities proposed through LAPA were practices that already existed in their communities.
Ghimire and Chhetri describe this as "everyday adaptation," the adjustments people continually make as they respond to environmental, economic, and social change. That matters because formal climate policy can sometimes treat local communities primarily as recipients of expertise. The Nepal study suggests another possibility: People living with environmental uncertainty have accumulated knowledge that can become a foundation for adaptation policy. The researchers argue that effective adaptation should therefore connect scientific and technical knowledge with local knowledge rather than treating one as a substitute for the other.
From local knowledge to climate policy
LAPA was designed to create that connection from the bottom up. The process asks communities to identify climate vulnerabilities, determine priorities and develop responses that can then be integrated with broader development and government planning.
The researchers found strong support for the idea. Ninety-eight percent of local respondents considered LAPA highly important for adapting to climate change. Eighty percent said their participation in preparing the plans made a difference. Those numbers suggest that communities saw value in having a formal mechanism through which their experiences could shape adaptation decisions.
But participation in planning does not necessarily translate into action
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said implementing the plans was difficult. The most important barriers included inadequate financial resources, insufficient government support, and inadequate recognition of local knowledge. That gap is central to Ghimire and Chhetri's findings.
A community may know that its water sources are changing or that agricultural practices need to adjust. It may even have a locally developed plan for responding. But without financing, technical expertise, and functioning institutions, that knowledge may never become meaningful adaptation. The researchers therefore argue for a two-way relationship: Local knowledge can make government adaptation policies more responsive to actual conditions, while governments can provide communities with resources and scientific information they cannot generate on their own.
Who counts as "local"?
The study also complicates a phrase increasingly common in climate policy: locally led adaptation. A community is not a single voice. Ghimire and Chhetri found that women and marginalized groups participated in Nepal's local adaptation planning, but participation did not necessarily mean their knowledge carried equal influence.
Men and women differed significantly in how they perceived women's participation and the recognition of local knowledge. Almost all of the LAPA implementation or monitoring committees examined by the researchers were chaired by men. At the same time, women were involved in grassroots organizations and adaptation activities that were not always recognized by male community leaders.
The findings expose a problem with simply moving climate decision-making from national governments to the local level. Power differences do not disappear when decision-making becomes local. For adaptation to genuinely draw upon community knowledge, the researchers argue, planners have to consider whose knowledge is represented, whose priorities become part of a plan and whose experiences remain less visible.
Can everyday adaptation keep up?
There is also a limit to what existing practices can accomplish.
Ghimire and Chhetri caution that adaptation strategies developed through experience with past environmental variability may become less effective as climate impacts increase in magnitude and intensity. That is where scientific knowledge and government capacity become particularly important.
Communities can observe changes in rainfall, agriculture or water availability and develop ways of responding to them. But they may need climate information, new technologies, financial resources or technical expertise to prepare for conditions outside their previous experience.
The researchers point to relatively modest interventions, including climate-based agricultural advisories, new seed varieties and alternative cropping practices, as examples of outside knowledge that can strengthen rather than replace local adaptive capacity.
The goal, then, is neither purely bottom-up nor purely top-down adaptation. It is to create what Ghimire and Chhetri describe as stronger linkages between the two.
A question made more urgent in Nepal
That argument has taken on new urgency following the Aug. 26 disaster along the Nepal-Tibet border, leading to Nepal renewing calls for stronger sharing of upstream glacier and river information with China. Scientists are still examining the precise causes of the collapse and the role of climate change in the individual event, but the disaster demonstrates the kind of challenge Ghimire's research anticipates: Local experience is essential, but some risks originate far beyond what a community can observe or manage on its own.
