LoCAL (The LoCAL Climate Adaptive Living Facility) has shown that performance-based grants for climate resilience can build local government capacities to handle climate finance and draw attention to the role of local authorities in addressing the climate change challenge at the local level. Experiences from the first five years of piloting and scaling up the mechanism in Africa, Asia and the Pacific have provided a range of lessons and good practices for design and implementation, bringing the existing knowledge and 20 years of UNCDF experience with performance-based grants to a new area of work.

The publication is organized into 10 chapters:

• Chapter 1 introduces the mechanism and its rationale.

• Chapter 2 describes the steps entailed in assessing the context and conditions to establish a LoCAL initiative in a country.

• Chapter 3 reviews the key elements developed when designing the mechanism.

• Chapters 4–9 explore the various stages of a LoCAL cycle as it is integrated in the local public planning and budgeting cycle, specifically touching on climate assessments (Chapter 4), planning (Chapter 5), budgeting and financing (Chapter 6), implementation of adaptation measures (Chapter 7), performance assessments (Chapter 8) and national roll-out (Chapter 9).

• Chapter 10 describes options for the way forward.