Community participation in climate change adaptation (CCA) programs has been advocated for long, but its implementation remains uncertain. There is also very little understanding and consensus on how and to what extent local communities can and should be involved in these projects. Arguably, both the concept and practice of community participation remain equivocal and contentious due to a lack of systematic effort to define the participatory framework in CCA. While the framework for community participation can be adopted from other planning and management discourses, yet they are typically expert-driven. The local communities hardly play a role in designing the framework. This study, therefore, took an alternative approach to define the meaning and implication of community participation from local communities’ perspectives. To this end, we used the grounded theory qualitative research methods to survey 50 respondents across five rural communities in climate change impacted Northern Ghana. To evaluate the communities’ meaningful participation in the adaptation projects, respondents suggested three critical parameters—First, community participation in a CCA project can be considered successful if the project contributes towards the livelihood security of the community. Second, the project outcome should be tangible. Third, the project should enhance the community’s skills and training such that the community can run a similar project in the future without much dependence on external agencies. This study provides an alternative methodological insight on how to design and operationalize meaningful community participation in CCA that will have universal application irrespective of the geographical and socio-cultural boundaries.

中文翻译：

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社区成功参与气候变化适应计划：以谁的方式？

长期以来一直提倡社区参与气候变化适应 (CCA) 计划，但其实施仍不确定。对于当地社区如何以及应该参与这些项目的方式和程度，也几乎没有理解和共识。可以说，由于缺乏系统性的努力来定义 CCA 中的参与框架，社区参与的概念和实践仍然是模棱两可的和有争议的。虽然社区参与的框架可以从其他规划和管理话语中采用，但它们通常是由专家驱动的。当地社区在设计框架方面几乎没有发挥作用。因此，本研究采用了另一种方法，从当地社区的角度来定义社区参与的意义和影响。为此，我们使用扎根理论定性研究方法对受气候变化影响的加纳北部五个农村社区的 50 名受访者进行了调查。为了评估社区对适应项目的有意义参与，受访者提出了三个关键参数——首先，如果项目有助于社区的生计安全，社区参与 CCA 项目就可以被认为是成功的。第二，项目成果应该是有形的。第三，项目应该提高社区的技能和培训，以便社区将来可以运行类似的项目，而无需过多依赖外部机构。