Exploring scaling up community-based adaptation: A case study with the PRODUCE Project in Rangpur, Bangladesh

Abstract

The effects of regional climate changes are emerging and it will have adverse affect on natural and human environment (IPCC, 2007). The IPCC report in 2001 suggested that those most affected by climate change’s affect will be people with the least capacity to cope with its accompanying risks. This includes people with high dependencies on agriculture, and populations with a low-level human development index and high rates of poverty, the attributes characteristic of developing countries. Adaptation is an approach to respond to these immediate impacts by adjusting the natural or human systems in response to actual impacts of climate change. Community-based adaptation (CBA) is a bottom-up and development-oriented view of adaptation that accommodates development needs as a means through which to increase adaptive capacity of vulnerable people. This approach uses their locally available and unique resources to undertake actions that can improve their adaptive capacity.

Scaling up is one method capable of moving CBA into a wider framework. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to explore how the incorporation of CBA elements can further the existing literature on CBA and scaling up community-based projects by using the data collected during fieldwork with PRODUCE, a development project initiated by CARE in Rangpur, Bangladesh. The field results from this study illustrate that scaling up is not an end in itself, but rather as a means to extend the benefit beyond the pilot phase. It also argues that knowledge management and time are imperative dimensions in scaling up CBA as uncertain future climate impacts and the nature of CBA remain emergent issues.