Update on historical policy analysis

Climate Analytics’ core role in the DOWN2EARTH project is policy analysis. Policy analysis specifically targets overall climate adaptation policies and those relating to water and food security in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. The aim is to understand existing policies, assess local-level climate adaptation governance and its linkage with government policies and assess the efficacy of policies. Once this is finalized the aim is to co-develop robust climate adaptation policy frameworks to support adaptation and foster resilience in a changing climate.

This commenced with identification of a suitable analysis framework for the work at hand followed by presentations to consortium members at the policy development team meetings to get feedback on improving the analysis framework. The policy analysis triangle was thus adopted. This framework, developed by Walt and Gilson (1994), considers actors, content, context and process and how they interact. Additionally, the horizontal and vertical interplay in policy analysis was also integrated to capture linkages as well as measures and goals set out in the policies.

Following this, the content analysis framework with a rating system was developed. This is particularly interesting as it captures issues of rights, accessibility, inclusivity, information management systems, implementation plans, budgets, enforcement mechanisms and linkages to capture the full breadth of issues that make for a robust policy.

This was followed by the identification of the relevant policies for analysis where over 100 relevant policies on adaptation, water and food security were identified and listed. These were categorized as international, national, regional and local and codified or uncodified and visualized via Conceptboard. The figure below for instance shows the policies identified for Ethiopia.

We then embarked on searching online for copies of the policies identified and uploaded them on a drive. Some partners were also able to share many policies that were not available online, especially partners from Somaliland’s Transparency Solutions who shared a number of policies from their region to aid our work.

The process of analysis then commenced with first a focus on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the three countries. The NDCs analysed provided a window into the overall climate policy framework in the countries. It is noteworthy that all the countries under this project now have updated NDCs that are more detailed and offer linkages to international policies, the national development blueprints as well as sectoral policies. The figure below shows a comparison of the various aspects as contained in the NDcs. A key gap appears to be accessibility, enforcement mechanisms and budgetary allocation that need to be areas of focus in subsequent updates.

The policy analysis work is still ongoing and will no doubt continue to reveal key issues that will need to be focused on to make them more robust and ensure implementation to safeguard the lives of vulnerable groups. Once the analysis is finalized some key insights will be incorporated into field survey interviews conducted by D2E partners to gain further understanding especially on the efficacy of the policies as well as the local governance supporting adaptation in the selected project sites. All these will be useful in the co-development of adaptation policy frameworks in a changing climate.