Beyond coproduction: a case study in direct funding to advance community-led resilience

Abstract Knowledge-based actors in academic institutions and government agencies increasingly apply coproduction to build the resilience and adaptive capacity of frontline communities. However, coproduced climate adaptation outputs are predominantly technical, scientific, or data products. Frontline communities often seek more practical outputs aimed at immediate resilience priorities. In this paper, we describe our community grants program, which provided direct funding to frontline community-based organizations, as an illustrative case study 1) to expand knowledge of what community-led climate resilience means and its impact in practical terms, and 2) to build understanding of the opportunities and limitations of direct funding for advancing climate resilience. We analyze project proposals and post-project semi-structured interviews to increase understanding of what frontline community-based organizations mean by resilience and how they approach that work. Our findings indicate that direct funding can ignite resilience at the local level and enhance trust building between knowledge-based actors and frontline communities. But direct funding is a resource intensive process and fundamentally focuses on making a difference on the ground in specific locations. We conclude, first, that academic institutions and government agencies need to take frontline communities and their resilience priorities seriously. And funding community-led initiatives is one impactful way to ensuring localized resilience impacts. Second, direct funding of community-led resilience initiatives is an important pathway for the adaptation field to broaden its conception of climate adaptation and have a local impact. And third, university- and government-based researchers can play an important role by assisting frontline community-based organizations achieve their resilience objectives and scaling out and up that work.