A new policy brief “Climate adaptation in Tanzania’s national budgeting process: embedding flood and drought preparedness” has just been published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, as part of the Behavioural Adaptation for Water Security and Inclusion (BASIN) project. The report was authored by Kate Gannon, Katarzyna Mikołajczak, Abel Dugange, Herbert Kashililah, V. Tondelo Gungulundi, Katharine Vincent, Will Ingram, Jessica Leech, Charles Wight and Declan Conway and produced as
Tanzania has spent over two decades developing climate policy frameworks, including the National Adaptation Plan (2025–2035) and the National Climate Change Response Strategy (2021–2026), that identify floods and droughts as priority hazards and call for proactive investment in preparedness. Yet this ambition has not translated into funded action. The brief reports that national budgets chronically underfund preparedness, even in the institutions closest to the problem, leaving people vulnerable to climate impacts and forgoing the development and resilience gains of proactive adaptation.
The brief applies a new multi-actor behaviour journey (MABEJ) methodology to examine where and why flood and drought preparedness is displaced from ministry, department and agency budgets across Tanzania’s annual budget cycle, drawing on 43 interviews conducted in 2025 with respondents from government and non-government organisations involved in, or with oversight of, preparedness and budgeting processes. It finds that under-prioritisation is not concentrated at a single point in the cycle but is cumulative and self-reproducing. The under-prioritisation is shaped by behavioural and institutional drivers including a culture of reactive response, limited shared understanding of what preparedness requires, institutional silos, coordinating bodies with mandates but insufficient authority, and monitoring systems too generic, or altogether lacking, to reveal under-provision.
The report identifies leverage points at every stage of the budget cycle and highlights three linked priorities: embedding explicit preparedness requirements within the National Planning and Budget Guidelines issued by the Ministry of Finance and the President’s Office–Planning and Investment; strengthening costed and coordinated preparedness provision in ministry, department and agency budgets; and making preparedness spending and delivery visible through improved budget tagging, tracking and monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and the public release of draft budgets to enable real-time scrutiny.