The role of institutions in managing local level climate change adaptation in semi-arid Zimbabwe

Significant efforts have been made to understand impacts and how communities adapt to climate change impacts, yet there is an urgent need to interrogate the capacity of institutions and institutional arrangements in local level adaptation processes. Literature highlights that the success of these adaptation efforts generally hinges upon the nature of existing formal and informal rural institutions. This paper uses largely a qualitative approach to understand institutional structural issues and the role of institutions and institutional arrangements in facilitating local level adaptation. From our research we note three salient findings and their implications for incorporating institutions in local level adaptation. First, the public and private institutions in the study areas play a key role in facilitating adaptation, which appears to be in contrast to previous research in which societal configurations indicate greater state retreat over the past two to three decades. Second, while there appears to be a straightforward distinction between public, private and civic institutions in terms of their functions, we suggest caution given the fuzziness and fluidity of institutional categorization on the ground. Third, it appears that institutions and institutional arrangements of an informal nature foster collective action, that they have remained important over the past decades and remain a critical entry point into dealing with exclusionary tendencies against the vulnerable in communities. Within a broader discussion of the role of institutional frameworks in facilitating adaptation our case contributes to the broader issues of the inevitability of ultimately dealing with development challenges in the process of fostering local level adaptation.