Planning and evaluating climate resilience programs in Southern Africa

Southern Africa faces intensifying climate risks shaped by rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, extreme weather events, and deep structural inequalities. As investment in climate resilience programming grows, so does the need for rigorous, context-sensitive frameworks for planning and evaluating such programmes. Yet current approaches to vulnerability assessment, predominantly built on the IPCC dimensions of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, often fail to capture the social, institutional, and relational drivers that shape how communities experience and respond to climate change. This paper employs a qualitative, comparative case study methodology to examine three climate resilience programmes implemented across Southern Africa between 2018 and 2023. Drawing on both primary data, including household surveys, participatory rural appraisals, ethnographic interviews, and micro-narrative studies, and secondary sources, the authors conduct a structured cross-case analysis of how vulnerability was conceptualised, how programme responses were designed, and how outcomes were evaluated. The authors propose an expanded vulnerability framework that builds on the IPCC model by incorporating three additional dimensions: mitigation and preparedness, response capacity, and recovery capacity. These additions are argued to better reflect the social dimensions of vulnerability, particularly in contexts of institutional fragility and structural inequality. Findings demonstrate that vulnerability in Southern Africa is shaped not only by climatic exposure but by governance failures, land tenure insecurity, limitations of social protection, and the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge. Programmes that adopted participatory, iterative approaches were more effective at revealing these intersectional and structural dimensions of vulnerability. The paper argues for a more holistic approach to resilience programming that integrates material, relational, and subjective dimensions of wellbeing, and calls for evaluation frameworks that go beyond economic and agricultural indicators. These findings have practical implications for national and international development agencies involved in climate adaptation programming across the sub-region.