Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how national climate experts have created accountability towards donors and political legitimacy in environmental governance under an authoritarian regime.

Paper long abstract:

The study argues that the global trend of up-scaling environmental governance to supranational (and undemocratic) organisations while downscaling environmental management to user communities of natural resources is especially attractive in countries with authoritarian leadership. It also supports the argument by Hagmann and Reyntjens that donors complicit in fostering development without democracy despite promoting the opposite.

The Gambia, an electoral autocracy in West Africa, is pro-active in climate diplomacy and successful in competing over global adaptation funds. It has won a GEF fund for a coastal project and needs to prove good governance and accountability towards donors on behalf of other African LDCs which would like to receive similar climate funds. The paper analyses the production of climate knowledge and documents, as well as the political response to sea level rise, which was declared the national adaptation priority. Findings illustrate from a states-at-work perspective how the tight expert network has succeeded in creating a positive country image towards the UNFCCC secretariat. It shows how these experts have opened space for climate adaptation and how this is based on a system of triple legitimacy (knowledge, swimming with the system, and the systematic link between national and global offices).