Civil Society Organizations’ Advocacy for ‘Locally Shaped Climate Solutions’ in an African context

The role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in climate change advocacy is increasingly acknowledged. Thus far, researchers mainly focus on identifying types of advocacy roles, e.g. in campaigning, collaboration with government in policy development and implementation, and raising of public awareness. However, there is little attention to contextual dimensions of such roles, and limited engagement with questions of representation and voice. This constitutes an urgent knowledge gap. CSOs’ advocacy roles in the context of international development often largely draw their legitimacy from their capacity to amplify local people’s voices, thus contributing to inclusive and sustainable development. At the same time, the nature of such roles of civil society organizations in developing country contexts is far from evident, given their embeddedness in relations with donors and the state that complicate their relations with constituencies. This paper explores how the challenge of amplifying local voices presents itself for CSOs working in a climate change advocacy programme in an East-African country, to provide insight into the complex, context-specific dynamics shaping such roles. The programme under study, running 2021-2025, was set up to enhance local voices and advance ‘locally shaped climate solutions.’ Led by an alliance of Northern- and Southern-based NGOs, it centres on advocacy and advocacy capacity strengthening and is funded by a West-European institutional donor. The paper explores how country-based partners conceive of and enact their possibilities to relate to constituencies within the programme. This is a qualitative study, based on 19 semi-structured (group) interviews that took place face-to-face in different regions of the country and online, participation in programme meetings, and document analysis. The study found that CSOs seek roles facilitating community engagement and inclusion in climate policy through their roles as intermediaries and enablers. A key objective is advancement of community needs that they see as underlit in local climate policy. However, two challenges emerge complicating these roles. First, ‘local climate solutions’ emerge in an interplay between power holders in which the local communities whose voices the programme was meant to ‘amplify’ often have a limited role to play – with CSOs observing, challenging but also contributing to this challenge in different ways. Second, CSOs face challenges building legitimacy with communities, given perceptions of limited relevance of climate-related advocacy, limited resources and the short-term nature of the programme involved. To strengthen their roles addressing climate change, CSOs felt they required more flexible funding for service delivery projects and emerging community priorities, and more funding to raise awareness and organize. Moreover, the analysis identifies a significant opportunity for building a bottom-up advocacy agenda that, interestingly, is not accommodated in the programme. In conclusion, the paper argues that this contextualized analysis points to adjustments in programming that could enhance CSO roles and help overcome the limits of current community engagement with climate change and the limited development of their voices that, as the paper argues, forms an important basis for the risk of elite capture involved with development of ‘locally shaped climate solutions.’