Mainstreaming climate adaptation into sectoral policies in Central Africa: Insights from Cameroun

While considerable advances have been made in mainstreaming climate adaptation into sectoral policies in most regions across Africa, little is known about Central Africa (CA) even though the sub-region has enormous potentials to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through the Congo basin forest. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the progress made in mainstreaming climate adaptation into sectoral policies in CA based on insights from Cameroun. To achieve this, 30 strategic policy documents published by the government of Cameroun covering different aspects of climate adaptation were exploited. Additional information was obtained from interviews with 27 stakeholders working in relevant government ministries/institutions and international organizations. Results show that significant progress has been made to mainstream climate adaptation into the forestry and energy sectors. This has been facilitated by the putting in place of national policies that consider climate change impacts and mitigation/adaptation in these sectors. Meanwhile, little progress has been recorded in the water and agricultural. The lack of progress in these sectors can be attributed to the absence of national policies that take into account climate change impacts in these sectors. Overall results show that the National Adaptation Plan of Action has played a key role in enhancing the mainstreaming of climate adaptation into sectoral policies in Cameroun. Notwithstanding the progress recorded, many obstacles such as the lack of human and financial resources still exist. Stakeholders proposed a series of potentially useful solutions to tackling obstacles hindering cross-sectoral mainstreaming initiatives. This paper contributes to contemporary debates on the extent to which adaptation mainstreaming is happening at national level in sub-Saharan Africa, and reveals the obstacles that need to be addressed in order to sustain this initiative in CA and other regions of the continent.