Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action

This study examines how communities in Atlantic Canada recognize, value, and integrate local knowledge into climate change adaptation, focusing on the enabling and constraining roles of funding, governance, and institutional structures. Guided by the Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) framework, the research forms part of a larger transdisciplinary project on collaborative governance in financing climate adaptation and mitigation. Using qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with municipal representatives, NGOs, funders, and community leaders, and participant observation, the study identifies both barriers and opportunities for embedding local knowledge in adaptation planning. Findings reveal that local knowledge is central to building climate resilience, not peripheral. Communities achieve the strongest climate action outcomes when flexible, multi-year funding is paired with supportive local policies, collaborative governance, and mechanisms for co-producing knowledge with technical experts. Successful examples emphasize grassroots project design, participatory governance, and place-based approaches tailored to community priorities. However, systemic barriers, including rigid, short-term funding programs, top-down policy frameworks, and bureaucratic institutional requirements, continue to limit the consistent and equitable use of local knowledge. From an SES perspective, the most effective adaptation strategies emerge from feedback loops between community experience, institutional support, and environmental change. The study concludes that policy shifts are needed to institutionalize long-term, locally controlled funding, formalize community participation in decision-making, and embed equity-centered, co-productive approaches into adaptation frameworks. Such measures would move beyond symbolic acknowledgment of local knowledge toward its substantive integration, ensuring climate action that is adaptive, context-specific, and grounded in the lived realities of Atlantic Canadian communities.