Improving governance and natural resource management is crucial

Governance and natural resource management (NRM) is an important cross-cutting theme for the BRACED programme as a whole. Local governance systems are hugely complex and any efforts to alter these institutional settings by, for example, promoting greater community participation in decision-making, are fraught with difficulties. Equally, aspects of local governance such as land tenure, rule of law, fiscal decentralisation, upward representation and formal-informal institutional relations, are likely to mediate access to the kinds of assets and information needed to build resilience.

Local governance systems are nested in national, regional and even international governance arenas and made up of relationships between state, private sector and civil society institutions, so their properties are highly dependent on factors across different scales. These vertical and horizontal relationships need to be clearly understood in order to appreciate the local context and identify any drivers of change. Policy and institutional reform at the national level can complement community-level initiatives and the engagement of these with local governance systems, but more research and evaluation work is needed to understand how these can best support each other. In particular, more research is needed into the specific aspects of local governance that mediate resilience building processes, as well as the appropriateness of different modes of engagement in relevant policy areas, such as NRM, disaster risk management (DRM) and climate change adaptation (CCA). This will help provide evidence of the pathways by which resilience can be built most effectively.

How external actors engage with state, civil society and private sector groups to manage resources and climate-related risks is highly relevant. NGOs can, for example, decide to support government agencies through capacity building activities, form partnerships or influence policies through advocacy campaigns. The level of engagement, whether at regional, national or sub-national (provincial, district, municipality, community) levels, also has a bearing on attempts to improve climate- and disaster- risk governance. Moreover, types of governance arrangements vary and include formal institutions such as legislation and parliamentary procedures, and informal institutions such as cultural rules for decision-making and civil society networks. It is important to note that if the two types of system complement each other, governance processes are likely to be more efficient and effective in enabling resilience-building processes.

Four sub-themes were selected to guide further research into the role of governance in building resilience:

• The role of local institutions such as land tenure, rule of law, fiscal decentralisation, upward representation and formal-informal institutional relations, in mediating access to ecosystems services, credit and climate information.
• The extent to which different systems of governance (centralised, decentralised and in transition) influence the effectiveness of interventions to improve resilience
• The effectiveness of different mechanisms of engagement with the state in DRM, CCA and NRM policies in building resilience
• The ways in which vertical integration in disaster risk- and natural resource- governance systems can be promoted from the bottom up