The goal of Community-based Adaptation (CBA) is to build the resilience of vulnerable individuals, households, communities and societies from the ground up. It is a ‘community-led’ or ‘community-driven’ approach to adaptation that complements top-down planning and programs. CBA also addresses social drivers of vulnerability including gender inequality, inequalities in the distribution of rights, resources and power are often at the root of poverty and vulnerability. Such social inequalities increase harmful climate change impacts on many poor people while constraining their options for taking action to reduce them through adaptation. Gender inequalities, combined with other factors such as age, ethnicity, livelihood group, or economic status, form an important and often insufficiently addressed barrier to equitable adaptation.
However, CBA often requires attention to both the current and future vulnerabilities resulting from climate change. Since future climate change impacts are uncertain, CBA interventions need to embody a learning-by-doing approach, iteration, and constant monitoring.
CARE’s Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation, Reflection and Learning (PMERL) approach helps communities address these challenges associated with climate change. The PMERL approach helps communities and service providers answer questions about the match between achievements and expectations, the appropriateness of achievements, the scale and appropriateness of CBA interventions. Participation, joint learning and reflection processes are integrated into the monitoring and evaluation of CBA to ensure these efforts are as effective as possible. This approach goes beyond conventional monitoring and evaluation by not only facilitating learning from change, but also by providing an evidence base to learn to enable change. And it encourages joint responsibility and co-learning between service providers and vulnerable communities to improve the CBA processes.
The PMERL approach is gender sensitive because it successfully does the following:
• monitor and document gender achievements in CBA projects which can be used for advocacy and in building the right enabling environment
• recognize that gender has significant power dimensions and thus monitor gender dynamics in relative terms, not in absolutes or in isolation from the rest of society
• Access the knowledge, attitudes and practices towards gender in relation to CBA implementation.