Climate change adaptation policy and community resilience in coastal West Africa: Institutional responses, localisation gaps, and adaptive capacity in Nigeria, Ghana, and Benin

Background: Coastal West Africa is among the world's most climate-vulnerable regions, with rising sea levels, increased storm surge frequency, coastal erosion, and saline intrusion threatening the livelihoods, food security, and physical infrastructure of millions of coastal community members. National adaptation policies across the region have expanded significantly under the Paris Agreement's National Adaptation Plan framework, but the translation of national policy commitments into community-level adaptive capacity remains deeply uneven.

Aim: This study examined how climate change adaptation policies in Nigeria, Ghana, and Benin address coastal community resilience, assessing the alignment between national policy frameworks and community-level adaptive needs, and identifying institutional and structural factors that condition adaptation effectiveness.

Methodology: A mixed-methods research design was employed combining national adaptation policy document analysis, household survey data from 840 coastal community members across six coastal districts in the three countries, and qualitative interviews with 27 adaptation policy practitioners and local government officials. Data were collected between February and November 2025 and analysed using descriptive statistics, binary logistic regression, and thematic analysis.

Findings: Significant gaps exist between national adaptation policy provisions and community-level adaptive capacity across all three countries. Financial resource flows from national to community levels are constrained by institutional bottlenecks and weak sub-national governance capacity. Ghana's district-level adaptation planning framework shows the greatest community alignment, while Nigeria's federal fragmentation and Benin's limited technical capacity present more substantial localisation challenges. Community-level social capital significantly predicts adaptive capacity independently of formal policy support.

Contributions: The study contributes to climate adaptation policy and resilience literature by providing comparative empirical evidence of policy-community alignment across three West African coastal contexts, and by identifying social capital as a critical community-level resilience resource that formal adaptation frameworks inadequately recognise and support.