Thanks to its deep engagement with local authorities across LDCs, UNCDF directly witnessed the early impacts of climate change at the local level on local economic development, across sectors. The LoCAL Climate Adaptive Living Facility (LoCAL) has been designed to address this challenge, building on over two decades of UNCDF experience in fiscal decentralization, performance-based grants, local public financial management, and local investments and procurement around the world.

LoCAL is a further refinement of these experiences and has shown that performance-based grants for climate resilience can build local government capacities to handle climate finance and draw attention to the role of local authorities in addressing the climate change challenge at the local level. Experiences from the first five years of piloting and scaling up the mechanism in Africa, Asia and the Pacific have provided a range of lessons and good practices for design and implementation, bringing the existing knowledge and 20 years of UNCDF experience with performance-based grants to a new area of work.

This publication builds on the outcomes of the first global UNCDF LoCAL lessons learned workshop, Strengthening Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Change through Local Government Systems, convened in Cambodia in November 2015 as well as on more recent developments as the pace of implementation continues to accelerate in newer participating countries.

The material is organized into 10 chapters:

• Chapter 1 introduces the mechanism and its rationale.
• Chapter 2 describes the steps entailed in assessing the context and conditions to establish a LoCAL initiative in a country.
• Chapter 3 reviews the key elements developed when designing the mechanism.
• Chapters 4–9 explore the various stages of a LoCAL cycle as it is integrated in the local public planning and budgeting cycle, specifically touching on climate assessments (Chapter 4), planning (Chapter 5), budgeting and financing (Chapter 6), implementation of adaptation measures (Chapter 7), performance assessments (Chapter 8) and national roll-out (Chapter 9).
• Chapter 10 describes options for the way forward.