Local climate action planning is a relatively recent field of practice. At the time that Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) and National Target Program to Respond to Climate Change (NTP-RCC) prepared the original guidelines for provincial level planning in 2010, there was very little international experience on which to base these procedures. However, since 2010 there has been a growing interest in local planning for climate adaptation, the focus of initial Climate Action Plans (CAPs) in Vietnam, and there are now a large number of guidebooks for local governments and a growing experience with local practice. As a result of this experience, it is possible to identify an emerging consensus around good practices in this new field.

By undertaking a literature review of the experience of leading global practitioners in climate adaptation planning, our study was able to identify good practices that have been implemented by other local governments around the world. Using these good practices as normative criteria, we then compared the experiences of provincial governments in Vietnam on CAPs produced over the period 2010 ? 2013. Nine provinces were selected for this study, taking care to select urban and rural provinces, provinces that had received international assistance and those that had not, from all seven climatic regions of the country. The study included review and analysis of the written provincial CAP documents, and interviews with responsible officials at the provincial level to compare local experience with international good practice. The complete results of our study are available in Vietnamese and English and can be found here. Keywords: Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation