Vulnerability Here, There, and Everywhere: What Happened to Ghana’s Decentralized Climate Change Adaptation Policy?

Across all the Bretton Wood institutions, decentralization has been touted as a fulcrum of good governance. This idea has had a sweeping effect across many areas of governance including climate change adaptation. However, the emerging climate change policy literature have had less focus on how decentralization can enhance adaptation governance at the local level. In Ghana, local governments have been given adaptation responsibility, through recently passed national climate change policies (NCCPs). This chapter of the book draws on experiences from the implementation of the NCCPs at the district level in Ghana which is perceived as a luminary of decentralization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter specifically assesses the extent to which decentralization of NCCPs has impacted adaptation governance at the local level. The chapter therefore aims at fostering understanding of the nuances of implementing decentralized adaptation governance in developing countries among scholars and policy practitioners. It concludes that though decentralized adaptation governance in Ghana increases the institutional space for community participation in adaptation governance it is falling far short of creating a the management regime capable of building requisite adaptive capacity as envisage by the NCCPs at the local level. Although it is extremely premature to draw reliable conclusions, the chapter identified some positive trends amidst challenges.