Kenyan counties invest in climate adaptation and peace

Future climate adaptation investments by Kenya’s County Climate Change Fund (CCCF) are poised to promote peace thanks to research-backed recommendations. 

The County Climate Change Fund (CCCF), first established in 2010, is one of Kenya’s most promising institutional responses to destabilizing climate change impacts, including frequent droughts and floods. Relying on principles of locally led adaptation, this climate finance mechanism enables local communities to prioritize, design, and obtain funding for climate adaptation projects such as water pans and boreholes.  

So far, five counties—Isiolo, Wajir, Garissa, Makueni, and Kitui—have fully put in place the CCCF. Coordinating the roll-out of the CCCF is the Adaptation (ADA) Consortium, a partnership between national institutions and non-governmental entities, which reports that the mechanism is now being scaled to Kenya’s remaining 42 counties. In fact, expanding the CCCF to all counties is included in the National Climate Change Action Plan III 2023-2027 as a key enabling condition for its successful implementation. 

The CCCF has a proven propensity for meeting local climate adaptation needs, and recent research from the CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) shows that the mechanism also helps solve some climate-related conflicts at local levels. Now, as a result of joint fieldwork and ClimBeR’s recommendations, the ADA Consortium is keen to make conflict reduction a more deliberate goal:

“Something valuable from this collaboration is the sensitization that this mechanism also has potential to resolve conflicts, which before has been mentioned more in passing,” said Joab JL Osumba, policy engagement, resource mobilization and agriculture lead at the ADA Consortium. “Now it is not going to just be said that if conflict comes there is a grievance mechanism. It will now be that if we are planning, let us also plan for conflict reduction.” 

Recommendations for the CCCF to promote peace 

In Kenyan counties, climate change impacts put pressure on farmers and herders, reducing their access to water, pasture, and food—something that can cause tension within and between communities. At the same time, efforts to build resilience may themselves increase competition over resources—and therefore the risk of conflict—if not designed and implemented in a conflict-sensitive manner.  

This increased risk of conflict is particularly apparent when the CCCF funds local projects that are located near political or administrative borders and that span across broader ecosystems or landscapes. In one case, a CCCF-supported water pan became a source of conflict when traveling pastoralists were refused access by the local community, who were also struggling with insufficient water supply. The escalating conflict eventually displaced people from the area, cutting off access to the water pan entirely. 

ClimBeR researchers learned about such conflicts when they, in collaboration with the ADA Consortium, conducted focus group discussions with CCCF stakeholders in Isiolo, Wajir, and Kitui counties. However, speaking to community members and representatives from CCCF planning committees also revealed how many CCCF procedures, such as its participatory proposal design processes, already reduce the risk of conflicts: 

“What they told us is that those processes are very important because they make people see things differently than they would have seen them if there were no discussion,” explained Osumba. “Because a decision is arrived at after a long consultative process, that decision is accepted widely—and if it is accepted widely, it means compliance is high, and when compliance is high, it means chances of conflict are reduced.” 

In addition, ClimBeR researchers surveyed people who had received CCCF funds and reviewed CCCF protocols, decision-making mechanisms, and governance structures. This work confirmed that the CCCF already possesses capacities and protocols that play an important role when climate-related conflicts break out around its projects: 

“While peace and conflict actors are not formally embedded in the CCCF’s institutional architecture, they play a de facto role in resolving conflicts in communities,” said Frans Schapendonk, a CGIAR climate security specialist and key contributor to ClimBeR. “But there is an opportunity for the CCCF to more systematically embed these kinds of actors at the levels where community proposals are reviewed, so that their expertise can play a role in assessing proposed projects and ensure that they’re designed not only in ways that prevent conflicts, but also to promote peace.” 

ClimBeR researchers therefore concluded that while the CCCF already contains a variety of promising practices for reducing conflicts, opportunities exist to systematically integrate these capacities and leverage the CCCF as an instrument for peace.  

For example, they recommended for the CCCF to ensure continuous funding of projects to avoid interruptions of service and to systematically document how projects interact with conflicts to inform future investment decisions and early-warning systems. Finally, ClimBeR researchers suggested that improving the coordination between local committees and governmental authorities could help address conflicts at the landscape level, such as between traveling pastoralists and local communities. 

A tool for assessing conflict sensitivity in climate adaptation 

ClimBeR first identified the CCCF as a potential mechanism for fostering climate security in Kenya at its common vision workshop in 2022. By mid-2024, they had developed the Conflict Sensitive Adaptation Governance tool, which they used to evaluate the conflict sensitivity of the CCCF, as agreed in a memorandum of understanding with the ADA Consortium.  

ClimBeR presented the tool to the ADA Consortium and invited feedback on potential opportunities for making the CCCF more sensitive to risks of conflict—for example by increasing investments in collective action—before the joint assessment took place. 

In addition, ClimBeR researchers designed the tool so that policy- and decision-makers might use it to evaluate conflict sensitivity in other climate adaptation mechanisms, beyond the CCCF. 

“The idea is that eventually we can use this tool to analyze other climate adaptation policy instruments, allowing us to build up a body of evidence and draw some broader taxonomic lessons about what specific characteristics and features of climate adaptation policy instruments can help reduce conflict,” explained Schapendonk. 

To encourage wider use, ClimBeR researchers shared the tool in several interactions with the Path to The Hague consultation process on environmental peacebuilding and at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in Hague. They also presented it at the 29th Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention on Climate Change. 

Setting out to address conflicts at the landscape level 

 Looking forward, the biggest challenge facing the CCCF might not be at community, but rather at landscape levels: 

“I think the major recommendation that is coming out is to take a landscape approach to this intervention,” ended Osumba. “With a landscape approach, we would actually go broadly and even deal with neighboring communities—we will have to touch more than one community, and that is where now a major intervention is needed.” 

 Further collaboration with the ADA Consortium is planned for 2025 to find ways for the CCCF to integrate conflict sensitivity in landscapes and across communities, while maintaining each community’s power to respond to their own climate adaptation needs. This work will be carried forward under CGIAR’s upcoming Climate Action Science Program. 

Author: Marianne Gadeberg, Independent Communications Consultant 

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR). We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/