Community-based adaptation costing: An integrated framework for the participatory costing of community-based adaptations to climate change in agriculture

Understanding the cost associated with climate change adaptation interventions in agriculture is
important for mobilizing institutional support and providing timely resources to improve
resilience and adaptive capacities. Top-down national estimates of adaptation costs carry a risk
of mismatching the availability of funds with what is actually required on the ground.
Consequently, global and national policies require credible evidence from the local level, taking
into account microeconomic dynamics and community-appropriate adaptation strategies. These
bottom-up studies will improve adaptation planning (the how) and will also serve to inform and
validate top-down assessments of the total costs of adaptation (the how much).
Participatory Social Return on Investment (PSROI) seeks to provide a pragmatic, local-level
planning and costing framework suitable for replication by government and civil society
organizations. The ‘PSROI Framework’ is designed around a participatory workshop for
prioritizing and planning community-based adaptation (CBA) strategies, followed by an
analysis of the economic, social and environmental impacts of the priority measures using a
novel cost-benefit analysis framework.
The PSROI framework has been applied in three separate pilot initiatives in Kochiel and
Othidhe, Kenya, and Dodji, Senegal. This working paper seeks to outline the theoretical and
methodological foundations of the PSROI framework, provide case-study results from each
pilot study, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the framework according to its
robustness, effectiveness and scalability