How can politically led planning and decision-making be transformed into a data-driven, inclusive, and last-mile Participatory Governance System?
Z M Sajjadul Islam
Advisor – Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Design & Implementation Center (MHEWC)
August 16, 2026
© 2026 Z M Sajjadul Islam, Advisor, Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Design and Implementation Center (MHEWC) https://www.mhewc.org/about/ https://www.mhewc.org/un-action-framework-for-integrated-climate-and-multi-hazard-risk-governance/
Giving the appropriate solution to the burning issues of ” How can politically led planning and decision-making be transformed into a permanent, ICT-enabled, data-driven, inclusive, and last-mile participatory governance system that continuously integrates context-specific evidence, local knowledge, and frontline priorities into planning, budgeting, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and public accountability?” We noticed that traditional governmental planning and political decision-making processes are often characterized by concentrated power, structural capture, and institutional constraints, with disproportionate influence exerted by politico-bureaucratic elites and other powerful actors. Transforming political decision-making for climate resilience therefore requires moving beyond fragmented, short-term, and top-down development approaches towards an inclusive, transparent, accountable, data-driven, and institutionally sustained system of climate-risk governance.
The politico-bureaucratic sphere of decision-making for climate resilience requires moving beyond fragmented development agendas that cannot be fully shaped by four- or five-year electoral cycles. Transforming to Climate-risk governance must be institutionalized as a permanent national responsibility, ICT-enabled, data-driven, digitally connected, transparent, and participatory. It should be founded on a “whole-of-society, whole-of-government, and whole-of-country” approach that enables every citizen to contribute meaningfully to public decision-making and participate in climate action at national, subnational, last-mile, community, and household levels.
Climate action cannot remain dependent solely on the priorities of the elected government machinery over the 4/5-year tenure, nor can responsibility be confined only to ministries, departments, political administrations, or a select group of technical experts. Although elected governments must retain leadership and accountability, side-by-side, climate-risk governance must continue across political power domains, reaching the whole of society and the whole of government. It should engage national parliament, the public administration, local governments, communities, civil society, academia, research institutions, the private sector, professional organisations, the media, women, youth, persons with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples, marginalized groups, and climate-frontline communities. A digitally enabled, last-mile inclusive and participatory governance approach should connect climate and disaster-risk data to inclusive planning, budgeting, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and public accountability to last-mile climate resilience building.
In many Least Developed Countries (LDCs), governments operate within four- or five-year electoral mandates. Each incoming administration understandably seeks to fulfil its political manifesto and demonstrate visible development achievements before the next election. However, short electoral cycles can create an institutional preference for highly visible, politically attractive, and rapidly deliverable projects. Climate adaptation, disaster-risk reduction, ecosystem restoration, infrastructure maintenance, social protection, and long-term resilience may consequently receive insufficient political attention and financial support.
The benefits of resilience investments frequently take many years to become fully visible, while their financial and political costs are immediate. This imbalance creates a tendency to treat essential climate action as a secondary or tertiary development priority, despite its importance to national security, economic stability, poverty reduction, and sustainable development.
Short-term political considerations may also direct public investment toward expensive, high-profile infrastructure and urban prestige projects that disproportionately benefit politically influential, economically privileged, or urban populations. Meanwhile, frontline groups, including smallholder farmers, fishers, value chain operators, microentrepreneurs, informal workers, women-headed households, and communities living in coastal zones, river basins, drought-prone regions, informal settlements, mountains, islands, and other hazard-exposed locations, continue to experience intensifying climate shocks. Many remain without adequate protection, essential public services, climate-resilient infrastructure, social protection, livelihood assistance, financial access, or a meaningful voice in decisions that directly affect their lives.
Climate-resilient development therefore requires the fundamental re-engineering of national planning, budgeting, public investment, and accountability systems. It demands a transition from closed-door decision-making often dominated by a limited concentration of political, administrative, technical, economic, and social power to an open, inclusive, decentralized, evidence-based, and publicly accountable governance model.
Traditional decision-making structures may involve elected national and subnational governments and their ministers, national assemblies and elected representatives, sectoral ministries and bureaucracies, departmental officials, influential political elites, selected political and technical advisers, permanent public officials, domestic and external interest groups, wealthy sections of society, and urban elites. These institutions and actors perform legitimate and necessary functions. However, when decision-making power is concentrated among them without adequate transparency, checks and balances, local representation, or meaningful public participation, development priorities and climate finance can become structurally captured by dominant interests. The result is constrained decision-making that may fail to reflect the risks, knowledge, lived experiences, and urgent needs of climate-vulnerable populations.
The required paradigm shift is therefore not simply administrative or technological; it is fundamentally institutional, democratic, and distributive. Climate-risk governance must combine digital technologies and reliable data with participatory planning, inclusive budgeting, decentralized authority, open access to information, independent oversight, social accountability, and transparent tracking of climate finance and development results.
The central governance question is therefore unavoidable: If development decisions, political authority, and financial resources remain concentrated within a system vulnerable to structural capture, how can governments genuinely hear, understand, and respond to the voices, priorities, knowledge, and lived realities of climate-vulnerable frontline communities?
(Further research, analysis, and technical strategies addressing this critical issue will be presented in due course…)
© 2026 Z M Sajjadul Islam, Advisor, Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Design and Implementation Center (MHEWC) https://www.mhewc.org/about/ https://www.mhewc.org/un-action-framework-for-integrated-climate-and-multi-hazard-risk-governance/ Let’s have a team meeting, zmsajjad@gmail.com , WhatsApp: +8801711979179
Recent Comments……..
Comment 1;
How about creating a hazardous-weather Early Warning System that explicitly reflects the region’s evolving climate? And how about building a climate information system that enables “good climate” outcomes supporting anticipatory, locally led adaptation grounded in ecosystem- and landscape-based approaches?
To make progress, we need an inclusive, integrated model that brings together meteorology, weather services, and climate intelligence to inform locally tailored, win-win climate action. This should align adaptation, mitigation, Nature-based Solutions (NbS), locally led adaptation (LLA), and resilience-building interventions. The model must be shaped by local realities, regional meteorology, observed climate trends, near-term weather risks, biodiversity, soil type and soil health, agroecology, ecosystem dynamics, and water-cycle processes.
Because agri-food production sits at the heart of the local adaptation value chain, we should also develop a fully climate-informed food production value chain. Its elements are deeply interconnected, linking landscapes, biodiversity, the built environment, and weather systems.
Defining and operationalizing this inclusive value chain will require focused research and development. Let’s convene consultations and explore the pathway forward in more detail.
Please support Research & Development (R&D) in this regard.
Comment 2;
The DRR financing flow appears broadly sound, but it remains insufficiently inclusive.
International agencies often prioritize producing policy signals and narratives, while investing less in the sustained, hands-on engagement needed to translate these into transformative change on the ground. The UN system also falls short in applying the right level of effort and in penetrating entrenched, country-level, tangential, and unskilled bureaucracies to drive policy translation, stimulate meaningful development action, inject stronger idea incentives into weak and fragmented governance arrangements, and build the capacity required to govern and deliver localized, risk-informed, last-mile development.
Against this backdrop, a critical question persists: how much have development partners actually achieved in service delivery after spending billions on SDG-related ideas, knowledge production, and technology transfer? It increasingly appears that development partners have yet to meaningfully penetrate and catalyze transformative change in LDCs and other developing countries. In many settings, the UN system is perceived and treated more like a national CSO than a system-level enabler of structural change, which is deeply concerning in what level they will be able to bring about institutional fitness in robust level planning and development.
Unfortunately, the efforts of development partners (UN agencies and INGOs) have not been sufficient to convert policy intent into localized, context-driven policy and programmatic action. What is needed is stronger risk-informed intervention capacity across central, regional, and last-mile actors, alongside systematic technical capacity-building at every tier of governance using tools, techniques, and implementation approaches that match local landscapes, social dynamics, and resource endowments.
These challenges persist largely because many development partners still face their own technical gaps, weak and ineffective mechanisms for applied knowledge transfer, limited nexus-building, and recurring shortcomings in stakeholder identification and partnering. Too often, knowledge, ideas, and technologies are transferred without adequate contextual fit.
Most critically, programs, projects, and schemes are sometimes anchored to the wrong institutions or counterparts, particularly through inappropriate selection of DRM partners, which undermines ownership, weakens sector-level coordination and partnerships, and ultimately reduces uptake and transformative impact.
These constraints continue to undermine development partner-led approaches and the pursuit of transformative change.
We therefore request an opportunity to undertake targeted R&D on this agenda to generate practical, evidence-based solutions that bridge these gaps and enable more context-appropriate development planning and more effective interventions.
How can politically led planning and decision-making be transformed into a data-driven, inclusive, and last-mile Participatory Governance System?
Post 1:
” Forecast-based Financing (FbF) decision-making system”
Risk-informed local development planning and financing in stable periods relies on coordinated, inclusive participation by all essential actors: government duty-bearers, donors, I/NGOs, sector agencies, financial institutions, insurers, credit providers, and at-risk communities, anchored in shared evidence and jointly agreed priorities. In parallel, climate and disaster risk-financing instruments must be scaled urgently so governments and humanitarian partners can strengthen safety nets for high-risk groups and deliver assistance that is faster, more predictable, and better targeted.
Governments’ capacity to manage climate risk is increasingly constrained by compound shocks, hydrometeorological hazards, and extreme weather-related events, alongside economic crises and pandemics that erode response capacity and destabilize local economies. As climate disruption intensifies, extreme events are occurring more often, with greater severity and shorter onset times, generating significant loss and damage on the frontline and increasing the need for accessible, actionable weather and climate information services.
To support timely preparedness and response, especially when lead times are short, strong observation networks, high-resolution numerical weather prediction, impact-based warnings, and integrated multi-hazard early warning systems are indispensable decision-support tools. These capabilities improve frontline resilience by enabling early action when forecasts indicate triggers that could escalate into disasters with a high probability of loss and damage.
An ICT-enabled Forecast-based Financing (FbF) mechanism converts these capabilities into practical operations by coordinating backend processes to release critical funds that trigger anticipatory humanitarian actions in areas identified by impact-based forecasting (IBF) as likely to experience severe impacts. FbF is activated when National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) issue impact-based forecasts, thresholds, warning levels, special alerts, and quantified anticipatory loss-and-damage estimates through an integrated IBF platform. It then allows humanitarian systems to mobilize early-action funding quickly based on forecast impacts, risk and vulnerability profiles, and projected losses and damages aiming to anticipate disasters, prevent impacts where feasible, and reduce human suffering and avoidable loss.
For further details, please refer to the strategic document:
https://www.mhewc.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Forecast-Based-FinancingFBF-Methodology.pdf
Please visit the Global Early Warning System(EWS) Platform at www.mhewc.org
Seeking partnerships and collaboration
Seeking partnerships and collaboration for Early Warning System-related research, design, diagnostics, and implementation across the Global South. Let’s start the conversation now.
The Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Design & Implementation Center (MHEWC) provides technology-based solutions to support the management of multi-hazard and climate risks at the local level.
MHEWC focuses on key areas, including country diagnostics of weather observation and meteorological monitoring systems, ICT(GIS, GPS, Survey Apps, Remote Sensing, Drone Image, etc.) tools-driven multi-hazard and climate risk assessments, ICT tools-driven PDNA/RPDNA, Sector Department/institutional assessments on EWS/DRM, Early Warning for All System (EWS4ALL) roadmap development, and EWS(end-to-end) System design implementation support. Developing Impact-based forecasting(IBF) & Forecast-based Financing(FBF) EWEA, EAP, EWAA decision support system development(DSS) for risk-informed DRM Governance System. Support country-level sector ministry and department in Risk-informed sector-level DRR/CCA/NbS/LLA Planning & Budgeting, Project Design and Implementation, etc.