This brief summarises research conducted by the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) in three sites in Uganda in 2010-11 and  discusses why climate change, adaptation and adaptive capacity matter in Uganda. 

ACCRA undertook extensive field research using qualitative, participatory techniques in three sites in Uganda from October 2010 to March 2011. ACCRA’s research sought to investigate whether existing programmes are
already contributing to adaptive capacity or not; to identify where existing programmatic approaches fall short; and to inform future actions to build adaptive capacity.

Recommendations suggest:

• Government and development partners can do more to incorporate issues of climate variability and change into current and future planning and implementation.
• Development interventions need to place greater emphasis on supporting the agency of community beneficiaries.
• Development partners need to better understand the context and to address the root causes of the underlying social, political and institutional processes within which their interventions operate.
• Greater focus on coordination and building the capacity of local governance and decision-making bodies is needed.
• Development partners must, as a group, ensure that their support to communities helps to address and strengthen all the characteristics of adaptive capacity.
• Understanding of adaptive capacity, and the processes that contribute to it, is weak and requires further research.