Written by:
Dr Laura Canevari
CEO
What if climate finance shifted its central question?
From: “What can you deliver in 24 months?”
To: “What do you need to safeguard this place for the next 24 years?”
Rebuilding Isn’t Resilience—Unless It’s Rooted
When Hurricane Iota struck Old Providence Island in 2020, my home was destroyed. But the deeper rupture came afterward, when the Colombian government launched Plan 100—a reconstruction effort that promised to rebuild the island in 100 days. What unfolded wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political erasure.
Heavy machinery arrived from the mainland. Contractors were flown in. Locals, those indigenous to the island, the Raizal people, were excluded from the conversation. Plan 100 erased memory, trust, and the possibility of a truly resilient recovery.
What we experienced in Old Providence wasn’t unique. It exposed how climate adaptation is often practiced across regions: pressured by deadlines, top-down, and funder-driven; with decisions made from afar, under pressure to perform (or be seen to perform).[i] Under this model, rebuilding fast becomes more important than building back better.[ii]
In these moments, urgency can mask injustice. People are surveyed, photographed, and promised—but not heard.
But there was another story unfolding…
Through a project funded by UNESCO and Open Society Foundations, we launched a participatory community-led planning process.[iii] Facilitating spaces where people could name their risks, share stories, and envision change, the adaptation roadmaps that emerged weren’t just technical tools: They were acts of reclamation—of memory, of agency, of future. This is what resilience looks like when it’s sovereign.
Finance Over Futures: How Project Logic Undermines Long-Term Resilience
After completing the community-generated roadmaps—co-created through workshops, mapping exercises, and long evenings of conversation—we hit a familiar barrier: funding.
The usual cycle began again. Proposal writing. Donor jargon. Packaging lived experience into log frames. We had the trust, the legitimacy, and the clarity of what was needed. But we didn’t have the format.
This is where many community-led efforts stall—not for lack of relevance, but because the structure of climate finance is misaligned with long-term resilience. As Friedman (2023)[iv] notes, this can turn vulnerability into a commodity—something to be quantified, managed, reported on; transact on—a fee-for-service model that often ends before anything lasting takes root.
But resilience isn’t built on quarterly deliverables. It’s built on iteration, presence, and care. In practice, this means community adaptation roadmaps are often shelved—not because they failed, but because they weren’t financially legible to the systems that claim to support resilience building.
What if climate finance shifted its central question?
From: “What can you deliver in 24 months?”
To: “What do you need to safeguard this place for the next 24 years?”
Shifting the question doesn’t mean abandoning rigor. It means expanding what counts; Process, time, trust.
We need climate finance that is relational, not transactional. Funding mechanisms that build trust over time, support local institutions, and allow communities to define success on their own terms. We need to replace the project cycle with a resilience cycle—one that honors process, adapts to change, and supports iteration. Because the future doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails for lack of continuity.
Local Knowledge Isn’t Just Useful—It’s Sovereign
In one of the community planning workshops, held in Elvina Webster’s home – one of the longstanding leaders of her community- elders and youth mapped the risks no one else was watching. One man pointed to a stretch of uninhabited coast: “That’s where the erosion is moving fastest.”
It didn’t matter to the outsiders implementing the contracts to rebuild the island, but it mattered to them. Yet in many adaptation processes, local knowledge is still treated as an input. A checkbox. Something to consult, not something to follow. As Neimark et al. (2020)[v] note, community members are often positioned as informants, not decision-makers. Moreover, what’s sometimes framed as “locally led” often unfolds as externally managed with local implementation added late (Rahman et al., 2023).[vi]
But the application of local knowledge is not just about giving a voice to the vulnerable. It’s a political imperative. It’s a claim to land, safety, and self-determination. It’s an issue of sovereignty.
Real adaptation starts when we stop extracting local knowledge to fit shallow consultation processes, and we treat it as epistemology. When we stop regarding communities as beneficiaries and start following their lead. See & Wilmsen (2022) remind us: adaptive justice must be recognitional, procedural, and structural. That starts with seeing community knowledge not as folklore, but as a form of governance.
When sovereignty is respected, planning will not be faster. Nor cheaper. But it will be real. It will be embedded, enduring, effective and accountable.
Living the Work: The Personal Cost of Staying Awake in a Broken System
There are days I wonder if we’re really making a difference. After 15 years working on climate adaptation —mapping risks, drafting roadmaps, supporting post-disaster recovery—I’ve seen both transformation and futility. I’ve flown into places days after a storm, led community workshops in echoing church halls, and watched brilliant local ideas struggle to move past planning into action. I’ve had to rebuild my own home after a Category 5 hurricane and seen my affected neighbors go from victorious survivors to exhausted. I’ve led participatory workshops in places where I knew, deep down, that the decisions had already been made elsewhere. And, many times, after writing yet another proposal for funding that may never come, I was left feeling like we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.
This isn’t a job I leave behind at the end of the day. It lives in my bones. In the WhatsApp messages from community leaders asking for updates long after the donor has moved on. In the heaviness I carry when I realize how often our best efforts get flattened by bureaucracy or financial bottlenecks. And there have been times when I have nearly stepped away, feeling like I have nothing left to prove. But I carry on.
The climate adaptation field is filled with people like me—driven, exhausted, disillusioned but still showing up. We become translators between communities and technicians, between lived experience and workplans. And in the process, we become contortionists—stretching ourselves to fit systems that were never designed for justice.
Burnout isn’t just personal. It’s structural. It’s the inevitable outcome of working within a system that demands deliverables but not depth, that rewards visibility but not integrity.
As Eriksen et al. (2015)[vii] remind us, not every response to climate change is a good one, and staying grounded inside flawed systems—while holding onto vision and values—requires constant recalibration. We are asked to mediate between urgency and process, between hope and harm.
Imagine if the emotional labor of adaptation—of witnessing, holding space, translating grief into action—was valued just as much as technical expertise.
Imagine if donor cycles were aligned with the pace of relationship-building.
Imagine if we designed systems that secure the well-being of those working to build climate resilience.
We’re still learning how to do this. But it’s not only possible—it’s essential.
If You Hold the Purse Strings, Hold the Weight Too
If you fund climate adaptation, then this message is specially for you.
You sit in rooms where strategies are drafted, pipelines reviewed, and workplans approved. You use terms like “scalability,” “climate mainstreaming,” and “resilience dividends.” But on the ground, these often translate to community fatigue, unmapped risks, and roadmaps that gather dust.
That’s not due to a lack of intention. It’s due to design.
Another hard truth: most climate finance flows through national governments. But what governments ask for doesn’t always reflect what communities need. There is a persistent structural gap between institutional priorities and frontline realities. Communities rarely have direct, sustained access to funding. According to a 2017 ODI study, less than 10% of climate finance actually reaches the local level[viii]—despite widespread recognition that local actors are best positioned to deliver lasting resilience. The rest remains locked in international systems, filtered through layers of institutions, intermediaries, and administrative overhead. The channels that do exist are complex, competitive, and scattered. So instead of implementation, we get assessments. Instead of progress, we get platforms.
And yet—there are ways forward.
Some funders are already walking that path. They are listening more deeply, taking longer views, investing in the messy, nonlinear work of real change. They are shifting from managing adaptation to stewarding it.
What would it look like if this became the norm?
If you truly believe in resilience, then funding it like it matters is the way forward.
- Create direct access channels for communities. Design financing mechanisms that allow grassroots organizations, Indigenous groups, and municipal actors to access funds without multilayered gatekeeping. Prioritize transparency, simplicity, and support.
- Fund local governments and grassroots coalitions. Build grant structures that align with how real work happens in real places—not just in capital cities.
- Invest in long-term processes. Offer flexible, multi-year grants that allow communities to adapt iteratively and sustainably.
- Allow for iteration, not perfection. Embed adaptive management into your funding logic. Resilience isn’t linear—and it shouldn’t have to pretend to be. Encourage reflection, not just reporting.
- Support the right to adapt on local terms. Let communities define success in their own language and timelines.
- Support impact studies led by local actors. Let communities measure what matters to them track change in ways that make sense to them.
- Track what matters. Use indicators such as % of funding reaching local actors, degree of local decision-making authority, and grant flexibility as benchmarks.
- Recognize and compensate emotional and relational labor. Fund the hours of trust-building, facilitation, and follow-up.
And above all, listen not to what is easiest to hear, but to what is hardest to fund: the slow work of sovereignty.
Next Stop: Hope?
We know now that real resilience building can’t be projectized. It must be co-created, slowly, with care—and funded in a way that values process as much as product.
Some donors are already charting a different path—quietly, patiently, letting go of control and funding with humility. They are becoming stewards, not just managers. Allies, not gatekeepers. They are learning to ask new questions:
“What would it take to build trust, not just track results?”
“What if our funding cycles aligned with community rhythms, not just fiscal years?”
Because when you finance adaptation and resilience with courage, you don’t just unlock outputs. You unlock dignity, agency, and the quiet revolution of communities resourced to rise.
And that revolution is more urgent than ever.
This is not a moment for small scale reforms. It’s a moment for reimagining and transforming.
We need a new paradigm—one where frontline communities are not invited late into the process, but supported from the start as protagonists. One where funders see their role not as brokers of solutions, but as enablers of long-term transformation.
The Caribbean has always adapted. It has survived slavery, colonialism, and catastrophe. But now, it deserves more than resilience as a buzzword. It deserves sovereignty, safety, and space to imagine futures on its own terms.
If you want to fund something truly powerful—fund that.
And if you want to do it with care, with courage, and with those already walking that path—then let’s walk it together.
Related posts
sign up our newsletter
ITACA Solutions is a technical services provider focused on implementing climate adaptation in coastal areas in the Caribbean. Sign up to our mailing list to receive our newsletter with updates about our work, publications, activities and events.