Adaptation Philanthropy as Infrastructural Justice
The Adaptation and Resilience Fund is a philanthropic initiative led by ClimateWorks Foundation with partners including The Rockefeller Foundation, Howden Foundation, Laudes Foundation, and Quadrature Climate Foundation. The fund aims to deploy more than $50 million to locally led adaptation projects addressing extreme heat, floods, and droughts in highly exposed regions, particularly cities characterized by informal labor, informal housing, and rapid in-migration. Its first wave of grants prioritizes urban areas in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub‑Saharan Africa, supporting interventions such as early warning systems, urban cooling, and financial mechanisms that buffer households and workers from climate shocks.
Beyond its monetary scale, the fund is framed as a corrective to the chronic underfunding of climate adaptation relative to mitigation. It positions philanthropy as a catalytic broker that “connects the dots” among municipal authorities, community-based organizations, and global climate governance arenas. By explicitly emphasizing locally led solutions, the initiative seeks to reconfigure traditional top‑down development logics and to shift decision-making power and resources closer to communities living with climate precarity.
Centered on communities facing the “greatest climate risks,” the fund rearticulates adaptation as a problem of infrastructural justice and social protection rather than solely technical risk management. The focus on informal workers and informal settlements foregrounds the socio-spatial inequalities that structure climate vulnerability, aligning the fund with theories of climate justice and uneven development. At the same time, philanthropic coordination across multiple large foundations exemplifies transnational governance arrangements that sit between states, markets, and grassroots networks, operating as a form of “globalization from below” but still embedded in elite institutional circuits.
The emphasis on locally led adaptation resonates with long-standing critiques of technocratic climate expertise and universalist development templates. It implicitly recognizes situated knowledges, community self-organization, and vernacular coping strategies as central to resilience. However, the fund also mobilizes data-driven tools—such as risk mapping, early warning systems, and financial risk modelling—that may reinscribe asymmetries of expertise and surveillance. The initiative thus operates within a tension between empowering communities and extending philanthropic and technical infrastructures into their everyday lives, raising questions about accountability, representation, and long-term dependency on external capital.
Practical Implications for Organizations
- Treat climate adaptation funding as infrastructural justice: link investments to informal housing, labour conditions, and urban governance, not only to physical risk metrics.
- Design philanthropic or corporate funds that explicitly prioritize locally led governance structures, with community organizations holding formal decision rights over grant design and evaluation.
- Build hybrid expertise platforms where local knowledge and lived experience are institutionally weighted alongside climate modelling and financial analytics.
- Use adaptation projects to experiment with new risk-sharing instruments—microinsurance, social protection floors, or heat-contingent cash transfers—co-designed with affected workers.
- Require grantees and partners to adopt strong data ethics and participatory monitoring practices, preventing risk tools from becoming mechanisms of exclusion or coercive control.
- Leverage cross-foundation or cross-corporate alliances to normalize adaptation spending as a core strategic pillar alongside decarbonization, with transparent learning loops across projects.
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