Beyond Climate Finance Dependency: Local Innovation and Self-Reliant Pathways to Climate Resilience in Rwanda and Mozambique

Abstract

Net-zero transitions are commonly framed through national pledges, technological pathways, and climate finance commitments, yet less attention has been given to locally grounded strategies emerging in resource-constrained settings. This paper examines how climate resilience can be advanced through self-reliant and community-embedded approaches in two African case studies: Rwanda and Mozambique. It compares Rwanda’s forest and wetland restoration policies and urban nature-based adaptation initiatives with Mozambique’s mangrove restoration, community carbon projects, and agroforestry-based regeneration efforts. Drawing on secondary literature, policy documents, and climate project evaluations, the paper argues that these cases reveal under-recognised forms of mitigation and adaptation rooted in indigenous knowledge, institutional innovation, and collective organisation.

At the same time, the paper analyses the dependency paradox that structures these transitions. Although the international climate regime is formally guided by the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), support from developed countries has frequently been delayed, insufficient, or delivered through mechanisms that generate new forms of vulnerability. The comparison identifies key enabling conditions for self-reliant climate action, including customary tenure arrangements, decentralised governance, community trusts, local finance, and nature-based solutions, while also highlighting persistent constraints related to scaling, monitoring and verification, benefit-sharing, and external dependence on donor finance and carbon markets.

The paper contends that climate justice should be understood not only in distributive terms, as a matter of financial transfer, but also in relational and institutional terms, as recognition of local agency, indigenous innovation, and the right to self-determined development. In doing so, it advances a more grounded account of net-zero transition in the Global South: one that values context-specific resilience-building while remaining attentive to the limits of replication and scale.