Evaluating Maladaptation Risks in the Externally-Funded Climate Resilience projects in Uganda: An analytical Review

Sub-Saharan Africa has become a primary destination for international climate finance despite contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions, and Uganda, ranked among the most climate-vulnerable countries globally, has attracted substantial resources from multilateral funds, bilateral donors, and international NGOs for agriculture, water security, ecosystem restoration, and community resilience programming. This analytical review interrogates how externally-funded climate resilience projects in Uganda translate into adaptive capacity. Applying Barnett and O'Neill's (2010) maladaptation framework to a documentary and policy evidence base that combines peer-reviewed literature with project-level evaluative and financial-tracking documentation, including Uganda's first government-produced State of Climate Finance Report, covering 1,620 climate-related projects and USD 35.8 billion in commitments between 2015 and 2025, the review identifies five interlocking pathways through which maladaptation manifests in Uganda's resilience landscape: donor dependence and the erosion of local institutional capacity; the marginalization of indigenous and local knowledge systems, the disproportionate burden of adaptation costs on women, land-insecure smallholders, and fiscally constrained government budgets; technological and infrastructural lock-in that forecloses future adaptation choices; and governance fragmentation arising from the misalignment between donor project cycles and the institutional timescales over which genuine resilience accrues. Underlying these pathways is a structural tension between upward accountability to donors and downward accountability to beneficiaries, which the review argues is not an incidental implementation failure but a predictable structural by-product of how international climate finance is architected and governed. The review concludes that addressing maladaptation risk in Uganda requires fundamental reforms to climate finance architecture, monitoring and evaluation design, and the devolution of financial and decision-making authority to local institutions, rather than incremental adjustments to individual project designs.