The role of climate change coordination offices in building resilience: Lessons from ACCCRN
This report shares lessons learned from the implementation of Climate Change Coordination Offices (CCCOs) for Can Tho, Da Nang and Quy Nhon, Vietnam, which sought to coordinate urban climate resilience planning. These offices were intended to serve a coordination function, to collect and interpret climate data to help assess climate risks to the city’s development, to develop a multi-sector strategy for climate resilience, to build the capacity of other technical units in climate change planning and resilience building, and to coordinate external funding and climate change projects across all sectors to ensure they were consistent with local priorities.
National policy has required provincial governments to plan and prepare for climate change in Vietnam since 2009. But there are a variety of different requirements from different ministries, and there was no local government body in 2010 that had either the mandate or the capacity to guide urban climate resilience planning. ACCCRN provided funding and technical support to create CCCOs for Can Tho, Da Nang and Quy Nhon – the latter managed by Binh Dinh province. The CCCOs adopted slightly different approaches in the different cities, but became more successful at capacity building, data management, planning and project development than they were at supporting participation of vulnerable groups and implementation of priority resilience building measures. It was difficult for CCCOs to gain legitimacy, even with the support of the provincial People’s Committees, when they were not officially recognized by the Ministry of Home Affairs. The assignment of climate change planning responsibilities to DoNRE has not solved the problem of how to manage this task at the local level, because DoNRE has neither the tools nor the mandate to coordinate planning for climate resilience across sectors. In order to do this effectively, some kind of high level staff function is needed to coordinate deliberative, iterative and collaborative processes that engage multiple stakeholders in sharing knowledge and making decisions.