Subsidiarity in climate action is critical for accelerating mitigation and adaptation responses that are embedded in institutional frameworks . Available evidence suggest that decentralised policies and actions are the rock bottom tools in which communities can engage with their local government in co-creation of solutions for confronting climate change and its impacts. The paper shares lessons on readiness one local government authorities in building climate resilience around Lake Victoria in Tanzania.

1. “Reducing Climate Change challenges through forestry and other land uses practices"
“Why good enough governance is a critical driver for addressing climate change challenges at
community level-Lessons from local authorities around Lake Victoria-Tanzania”
Author: Donald Kasongi
Governance Links Tanzania
P.O Box 1923
Mwanza-Tanzania
E-mail:donaldkasongi@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract
The search for locally appropriate approaches on climate compatible development continues .The
enabling of comprehensive responses to climate change amongst competing value laden land uses
through the convergence of science and politics of delivery remains contentious. Meanwhile, it is a fait
accompli that the ultimate evidence on successful scaling up of good practices and innovations must
reconcile land management, communities, science and policy making. The complexity of driving change
with multiple structures and levels require a uniting force, without which interventions remain insular
and fragmented. Local Government reforms in Tanzania offer a menu of promises for effectively
promoting resilience at community level through promoting core norms of good governance. However,
despite the national level commitment demonstrated through the 2007 National Adaptation
Programme of Action, the 2012 National Climate, Change Strategy, and the 2013 National REDD+
Strategy and Action Plan, there is no evidence of Local Government Authorities taking independent
initiatives to develop context-specific land-based responses except in few project-driven cases..
Lessons from local government authorities around Lake Victoria indicate that, whereas the science part
of the equation is evidently delivering in building knowledge base and advancing cross-sectoral
scenarios for action, putting leadership in the process is an unavoidable requisite towards institutional
mainstreaming of climate change. Institutional capacity and financing have always been cited as the
constraints. This reality signals the need for political engagement, suggesting that good, context-
informed land governance should therefore guide the pathways. We refer to it as Good Enough
Governance.
Key words: climate change, complexity, land, local government, good enough governance, Lake Victoria,
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1.0 Introduction
The best available evidence indicate that climate change is real , and the science is clear about the
scenarios for now and in future .Whether driven by natural or human forcing, can lead to changes in the
likelihood of the occurrence or strength of extreme weather and climate events or both. The stakes are
definitely high across communities and sectors ranging from water, through human health to food
sovereignty. Since the IPCC Annual Report 4, the observational basis has increased substantially, so that
some extremes are now examined over most land areas (Cubasch, U.et al (2013) .The most compelling
evidence of climate change derives from observations of the atmosphere, land, and water bodies. In situ
observations by various land users can no longer be contested. Responses for mitigation and adaptation
need to be articulated at various levels from global to local level, ensuring that frameworks and
processes are consistently equitable and participatory.
2.0 Land as a base natural capital
Dramatic changes around food, climate, energy, and finance in recent years have pushed questions of
land use and land control back onto the centre stage of development discourse, at the very moment
when the same conditions are spurring an unprecedented rush for land and water across the globe (
Borras and Franco, 2012).
Besides human capital, land is the greatest asset in Tanzania. It is the eventual source of basic services
on which livelihoods and broader development are anchored. In all development discourses, including
the National Development Vision 2025 seeking to drive the country to middle income, will need to fall
back on land as the foundation for investments in social and economic parameters. Nevertheless, land
is a finite resource, becoming increasingly under pressure as time unfolds. Factors such as climate
change, demographic shifts, and changing patterns of work and habitation are already creating
insurmountable challenges. Also, as these pressures intensify, so will the demands we make on our land.
This is already happening as we seek maximizing economic returns while recognizing that the potential
to yield benefits in diverse areas such as ecosystem services, mitigating climate change, and wellbeing.
Deciding how to balance these competing pressures and demands is a major challenge that should
addressed at all governance levels and from policies to practice , and one that is all the more pressing
due to the time required to roll out new land use policies.
The land reforms alongside decentralisation by devolution in the country provide a useful platform for
addressing land management intricacies. Land and water are central elements in the climate crisis.
Industrialization and economic growth depend greatly on the exploitation of land and water, and their
capture to serve energy production, mining, industry, agriculture, technology parks, tourism, recreation
and urban expansion, continues unabated in every region of the world. Land cover and land-use changes
are the oldest global impacts of humankind and result in significant changes to the amount of carbon
that is stored and released into the atmosphere. Forests and wetlands store more carbon than
grasslands, which in turn store more carbon than croplands. (Guttal and Monsalve, 2011).The most
challenging policy question is how to make better use of land across the country for climate mitigation,
adaptation and supporting transition to a sustainably greener society. Unfortunately, the current policy
architecture does not reflect addressing this narrative. The country is witnessing heightening natural
resource conflicts, as seen in the weakening farmer-pastoralist co-existence. In some places, the
conflicts are reaching crisis levels leading to violent conflicts.

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3.0 The inextricable but evident land-climate nexus
It is an accomplished fact that land use will play an exceptionally role in both climate change mitigation
and adaptation. The nascent appreciation of this fact by decision makers both at policy and field levels
consistently suggests that more contextual research to inform local action on the complex interaction
between the effect of climate change on land itself, and the use of land to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, is needed. The ultimate decisions should therefore be integrated into local governance
policies to avoid land use and management changes undermining coping strategies and resilience.
In trying to understand Tanzania’s readiness to leveraging institutional responses to climate change at
various levels, we find no explicit evidence of strategic responses across the board. The National
Climate Change Strategy emphasizes the need to build capacities in research within public sector and
silent about what should happen at community level. While Tanzania has been identifying many
potential climate change activities through plans and strategies, these have not been translated and
prioritised into deliverable interventions at local level, largely due to less mentioned limited capacity to
enable the mainstreaming of climate change across all stakeholder groups, both government and non-
governmental, policy confusion in steering processes and finance oriented planning ignoring existing
coping strategies.
Reflecting on land as natural capital for most development interventions, the concerns on land reform
directly fall into the arena of governance. The parameters of governance in general are under
substantial change. In policy and legal terms this is evidenced in texts of constitutions, national and local
government natural resource management legislations. For effective legal discourses ,land interests
must be accorded respect and to which new land policies and laws must themselves adhere,
establishing core principles through which land along with other resources will be governed.
4.0 Lessons from the Lake zone Local Government Authorities
Tanzania’s Lake zone(Lake Victoria) on mainland Tanzania is not administrative unit, but used for
convenient reflection on some common socio-economic and cultural characteristics. The zone covers six
regions of Geita, Kagera, Mara, Mwanza, Simiyu and Shinyanga. The regions are divided further into 31
local government authorities .According to the national population and housing census of 2012, the
zone hosted close to 12 million people, about 28% of the mainland population, with average annual
growth ranging from the lowest 1.8% in Simiyu to the highest 3.2% in Kagera. The most dominant land
uses are agro-pastoralism, settlements, wildlife protected areas forests (both reserved and in public
land), fishing and infrastructure.
A participatory qualitative assessment conducted by Governance Links Tanzania in collaboration with six
regional authorities in the Lake zone in January 2014 was an attempt to establish some baseline
understanding of how climate policies and interventions are being articulated in local government
authorities. Despite that the early findings were not surprising at all; it was disheartening to learn that
little is happening at local level to engage communities in the climate change discourse. The following

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finding emerged from the participatory qualitative study with the of the 36 local government authorities
of which 31 are mainly rural and 5 are urban authorities (The results represent summarized institutional
responses rather than responses from individuals)
*In 83% of the local government authorities, executives and elected leaders in indicated to be aware of
the climate change and its impacts,
*44% of the local government authorities reported to have built institutional knowledge of what is
supposed to happen
*only 11% provided evidence on how they were including climate change in their local development
policies and plans,
*Only 8% were able to demonstrate adaptive mitigation and adaptive practices
*11% indicated urban authorities needed to contextually plan differently from rural authorities,
*17% had gone through and rolling out capacity building for extension and advisory services teams
* Only 5.5% had begun rolling out Community Based Climate Change Adaptation plans with the support
of donors through special projects.
The findings from this rapid study indicate that:
 There is a policy disconnect between central government and local government in the
implementation and particularly localization of responses to climate change
 Local government authorities through regional administrations take the vulnerabilities to
climate change as thins
 Institutional responses to climate changes in local government are expected to happen as
“finance driven projects” than “life projects” of communities
 It is not clear how local government authorities can demonstrate localism on climate change
taking advantages of decentralisation by devolution in which decisions at relevant local level are
accorded priority in local policies and actions
 There is no evident for climate relevant institutional actors working together to guide local
government authorities setting up institutional responses to climate change
 Local governments may be waiting for capacity building on climate change adaptation instead of
striving towards competence building to tackle the cross cutting issue
 Unless well guided by central government, institutional arrangements for land-climate nexus are
likely to sit uncomfortably with ownership of land and property rights.

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5.0 Why Good and Enough Governance for the Land -Climate change nexus
Governance is an elusive and much debated concept, but many agree that the contemporary
connotation is the set of rules and norms that govern relationships in any society and in this case the
institutional relationships across government, civil society, private sector and communities. The search
for novel governance at central and local governance levels is being lauded, and for the case of local
governmental reforms moving towards genuinely decentralised, shared, collective and inclusive
decision-making. Governance challenges are not fundamentally about one set of people getting another
set of people to behave better. They are about both sets of people finding ways of being able to act
collectively in their own best interests. Getting good governance requires that improvements that span
across almost all aspects of the public sector from institutions setting rules for economic and political
interaction, to decision-making structures that determine priorities among public problems and allocate
resources to respond to them, to organizations that manage administrative systems and deliver goods
and services to citizens, to human resources that staff government bureaucracies, to the interface of
officials and citizens in political and bureaucracy.
The concept of good enough governance provides a platform for questioning the long menu of
institutional changes and capacity-building initiatives currently deemed important (or essential) for
development. The concept admits that given the limited resources of money, time, knowledge, and
human and organisational capacities, practitioners are correct in searching for the best ways to move
towards better governance in a particular country context (Grindle, 2007)
.
The need for working across sectors has been emphasized by mainstreaming of policies and practices.
While Climate change as a policy matter is assigned to particular central government authority, the Vice
President’s Office in the case of Tanzania, its visibility fades with delegation of responsibilities to sub
national and local government levels. Lessons from other cross-cutting issues like Gender and HIV /AIDS
have consistently shown that institutional willingness should not be assumed to deliver change but
formally driven commitments is a prerequisite to be able to address questions characterizing how norms
of good governance particularly the rule of law, inclusion , participation ,equity and transparency ,
accountability can be operationalized and compared across or within contexts at different moments in
time in ways that are verifiable. Given limited resources of money, time, knowledge, and human and
organisational capacity, what are the best ways to move towards good enough governance getting
policies and practices right?
Not surprisingly, advocating good governance raises a host of questions about what needs to happen ,
when it needs to happen and how it would be expected to happen . The direction provides a platform
for questioning the long list of institutional changes and capacity-building initiatives deemed necessary
at any point in time. A key lesson is that reforms should be sequences and not attempting to achieve
changes in every aspect at the same time. For anchoring climate change in the local context,
popularizing the conceptual framework is the critical initial step towards ownership of subsequent policy
articulation and rolling out interventions. The Critical point of choice for governance is deciding whether
to address the climate change-land nexus challenges in an incremental and piecemeal fashion, or aiming
for a more coherent and consistent approach to managing land use or just a combination of the two.

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6.0 Actions and Inaction on Climate change in Local Government
Do we wait for a major climate scandal to act ?Understandably, there are no tensions between
responses to climate change and leveraging land use in any context , but It is acknowledged that
idealism is not the way to act on climate change. It is about better positioning to the “new normal”.
Effort to build resilience in need to consider initiatives that would not only aim to reduce the
vulnerability but also proactively support communities and systems to adapt. Major institutional
challenges will be stimulating commitments of local government authorities and creating space for
innovation than waiting for prescriptions from central government. Unfortunately, it appears that
climate change responses are expected to be “projectised” , and therefore the usual suspect for inaction
is finance. While the climate finance frustration is looming across the global, local governments do not
seem prepared to begin with the baby steps that can be pursued without project-based finance,
particularly promoting Community based adaptation.
7.0 Conclusions
Tanzania has experienced strong economic growth over the last decade, partly due to increased
government spending, and also through investments that aim to achieve the national vision of Tanzania
becoming a middle-income country by 2025. Maintaining and even increasing the growth rate will need
to take into account the need for adaptation to the new climate normal. Adaptation is not an objective
or end point, a process of continual adjustment which, if successful, will enable socio-economic or
environmental goals to be achieved despite a changing climate context. There is no clear measure or
benchmark that signals that an adaptation programme is ‘successful’, and adaptation will never be fully
achieved within a normal programming cycle. This means that tracking adaptation often relies on a wide
range of proxy measures which relate to the achievement of broader societal aims. This can make it
difficult, and not necessarily desirable, to separate adaptation from overall sustainable development
objectives. A paradigm shift is therefore necessary towards climate-resilient development pathways,
shifting away from practices that are incompatible with the challenges of climate change.
8.0 Policy Implications
The strong linkages between climate change and development priorities are both direct and indirect.
The issue is not only whether the linkages exist, but how to reflect them in a manner that drives
sufficient action at all governance levels, while accounting for the strengths and limitations of each
policy framework. There is therefore a strong case for governments at national, sub national and local
levels to develop an over-arching approach cognizant of the fact that a response to climate change has a
cross-cutting nature over land across different user sectors and adopting a long-term perspective taking
into account the impact of changing circumstances. There are different ways to integrate climate action
into local governance, and effective mainstreaming will require setting up climate smart goals within
and across sectors (including ‘climate-smart’ goals with targets that deliver ‘a triple win of ending

7. 7
poverty, shifting to low carbon development, and enabling adaptation, disaster risk management and
resilience to environmental shocks and stresses’). This reality signals the need for political engagement,
suggesting that good, context-informed land governance should therefore guide the pathways.
Good enough governance supported paradigm shift changes in reconciling the climate-land nexus for
sustainable development call for an overarching perspective with the following recommendations:
I. Local government authorities in collaboration with other key actors particularly the meteorology
department assessing community-level vulnerabilities and encouraging research-based policies
to spur institutional commitments
II. Leveraging land governance beyond land use planning in its broad sense including how land is
valued and incentives for its use well established for delivering expected benefits across all
users.
III. Given the growing demands being placed on land, and with unpredictable conflicting needs of
individual households, communities, local authorities should consider strengthening economic
and regulatory mechanisms to deliver the best value of land. Local government authorities
urgently need to build competencies (not only expertise) amongst their governance structures
to deliver effective regulation.
IV. Establishment of a highly inclusive incentive schemes for better land governance in relation to
provision of public goods and basic social services, with increased participation of corporate
sector which is taking an increasing share of service delivery.
V. Carefully balance the emphasis on technological solutions with participation of local
communities and indigenous knowledge to avoid leaving behind those with low cost potential
for contributing to resilience building.
VI. Promoting biodiversity governance in which the ecosystem services approach is the overarching
framework supported by complementary schemes like REDD+ thus providing a comprehensive
way of harnessing the value of forests and catchments
VII. A move towards promoting more Flexible and Forward-looking Decision Making (FFDM) is being
proposed at all governance levels from national to local, to help communicate and promote the
principles that link land use and climate change across the spectrum of policy makers and
practitioners

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10.0 References
1. Cubasch, D. Wuebbles, D. Chen, M.C. Facchini, D. Frame, N. Mahowald, and J.-G. Winther, 2013:
Introduction. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis
2. Grindle,Merille S(2007): Good Enough Governance Revisited in Development Policy Review, 25
(5): 553-574
3. Guttal, Shalmali and Sofia Monsaldve ,Society for International Development ,2011-Climate
Crises: Defending the land
4. Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco, July 2012; Land Sovereignty’ Alternative?
Towards a Peoples’ Counter-Enclosure