Beyond “Is development adaptation?”: Rethinking climate resilience in development policy

As climate risks escalate and adaptation needs increase, policymakers and practitioners face a central question: is development itself enough for climate adaptation, or does adaptation require a distinct policy agenda? 

This question formed the basis of a high-level roundtable convened by the International Growth Centre (IGC) during London Climate Action Week 2026. The event brought together diverse perspectives from across research, policy, and practice to explore the relationship between development and adaptation, drawing on experiences from Pakistan, Indonesia, South Africa, and beyond. 

Are we asking the right question about development and climate adaptation?

In low- and middle-income countries, development programmes are delivered through long-established planning processes, sector strategies, and investment approaches, typically focused on optimising for growth. Adaptation, by contrast, has been presented as a separate agenda. 

It has usually fallen to environment or climate ministries, which receive ringfenced budgets but rarely have the institutional reach to influence how social protection systems, agricultural programmes, or infrastructure projects are designed. The result is that adaptation remains separate from the mainstream of development decision-making. 

The discussion at the roundtable raised a practical question: are current development approaches effective under a changing climate? Rather than viewing development and adaptation as competing agendas, this reframing emphasises that development interventions must be designed and implemented with climate risks in mind from the outset. 

Rather than asking policymakers to choose between development and adaptation, the right question asks how to embed climate resilience within the systems that already shape development decisions. It does not require a new ministry or a new financing window – it requires existing planning processes to systematically account for climate risk, so that resilience is built into development by default. 

Building evidence to inform adaptation decisions at scale

A growing body of research is addressing the question of whether development is adaptation by identifying the resilience impacts of different development interventions. For example, Premand and Stoeffler (2022) find that cash transfers in rural Niger insulate households from consumption losses under drought by facilitating savings and agricultural intensification. 

Forthcoming work by Balboni et al. finds that BRAC’s ultra-poor graduation programme in rural Bangladesh, which combines asset transfers, livelihood training, and income support, offsets consumption losses during unexpected drought and flood shocks. This reflects recipients’ increased ability to maintain and diversify productive assets and labour activities. 

This literature is relatively nascent, with a lack of evidence across many of the low-income contexts hardest hit by climate change. Much of it is drawn from randomised controlled trials that vary in scale and may not translate readily to other settings. We still have a lot to learn about which interventions perform best, under what conditions, and at what scale. 

Closing these evidence gaps requires a broader approach to evaluation. Interventions need to be assessed across the full distribution of weather outcomes, including the extremes. Evaluations need to be forward-looking, asking whether a programme’s implementation, governance, and costs are themselves vulnerable to future climate conditions. Researchers also need to account for ancillary costs and benefits that determine a policy’s wider effects on society. 

Programmes that demonstrate strong impact under pilot conditions often face significant challenges when implemented at larger scales. This points towards a broader research agenda – one that complements evidence on programme effectiveness with a greater understanding of implementation, scalability, and institutional feasibility. 

The implementation gap is as important as the evidence gap 

Understanding what works is only half the challenge. Getting good interventions into government systems – and keeping them there – is the other. Climate adaptation does not have a natural home in the established planning processes for development policy – it cuts across ministries, disrupts existing budget lines, and demands an evidence-based decision-making process that many government structures are not yet built for. 

Three practical lessons emerged from the discussion:

1. Sectoral planning is where adaptation moves from concept to practice. If every sector – health, agriculture, infrastructure, urban development – is required to factor in future climate conditions, adaptation gets embedded into the fabric of public investment. The most effective entry point may not be a new programme, but a change to the planning process itself.
2. The institutions that design policy and those that implement it are often different, and this distinction is consistently underweighted. Unforeseen coordination failures emerge at the implementation stage regardless of how well a policy is designed at the top. Mapping the full institutional landscape, not just the key ministries, is a precondition for interventions that actually reach people.
3. Adaptation is inherently local. Solutions designed at the national or international level may fail to account for the localised nature of climate risks, institutions, and household vulnerabilities. Building local capacity across subnational governments, community organisations, and civil society to identify needs and design responses is essential for effective adaptation policy. 

How should climate adaptation be financed? 

Roundtable participants cautioned against assuming that a separate and substantial pot of adaptation finance will arrive and can be deployed at scale once the right instruments are in place. In practice, the flows do not arrive at the speed or volume required, and the financing model itself needs rethinking.  

Private capital can and should be mobilised for adaptation where a business case exists. One illustrative example highlighted during the discussion was Amazon’s network of disaster relief hubs, which repurpose existing warehouse and logistics capacity to deliver emergency supplies during weather shocks. 

In this case, private infrastructure is redirected to support resilience at relatively low marginal cost, albeit in higher-income contexts. Identifying and developing these sorts of opportunities and finding creative ways to make the business case for private sector involvement in adaptation is central to rethinking adaptation finance.

But private finance will not address the social equity dimensions of adaptation: the communities living on floodplains, the urban poor facing heat stress, or the smallholder farmers at risk of losing their harvest due to extreme weather. For these groups, public finance – from governments and development institutions – remains indispensable.  

Climate resilience is central to development

Development should remain the central framework for low-income countries facing accelerating climate risks. At the same time, resilience must be treated as a core part of development at every stage of the policy process, rather than a secondary, add-on, or competing consideration. This means systematically assessing how interventions perform when climate shocks occur, designing programmes that help households build income and assets despite climate variability, and building institutional capacity across governments to incorporate resilience into planning processes. 

The IGC’s Climate and Growth Initiative seeks to help build the evidence base that this agenda requires: identifying which development interventions are most adaptive, under what conditions, and how they need to be designed to deliver resilience at scale.