ABSTRACT
During recent years, adaptation to climate change has gained serious momentum in development practices, with many development agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) launching adaptation projects and programmes. While most of these organizations decided to start ‘doing’ adaptation three to four years ago, the available knowledge on what to do and how to do it was not particularly satisfactory. With a ‘trial-and-error’ mindset, it was thus argued that starting at that time would allow such organizations to ‘learn by doing’, which seems fairly sensible in a context of great pressure from civil society and poor countries themselves. The current situation is that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the German Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), ENDA, Oxfam and many others have managed, or are currently managing, adaptation projects in most of the developing world.
