The Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF) supports local initiatives in vulnerable communities around the world to help strengthen their resilience to violent extremism. This report utilizes case studies of Kenya, Kosovo, and the Philippines to analyze how each country incorporates local level actors within their respective National Action Plan (NAP) to prevent and counter violent extremism. To understand local efforts, we completed a three-step analysis. First, we performed a literature review covering both decentralization and decision space analysis. Next, we reviewed each NAP, giving a summary of the plan, its goals, and the stakeholders involved. Finally, we developed a qualitative coding schema to comprehensively assess NAPs in terms of best practices laid out by the United Nations. The analysis suggests GCERF can strengthen their local effectiveness by focusing on the following policy initiatives: promoting empowerment, supporting capacity building, and connecting with development agencies and NGO’s to improve decentralization outcomes.

Climate change has wide-ranging negative effects on public infrastructure, socio-economic and demographic inequality, and physical and mental health outcomes. Children in poverty are at highest risk of experiencing these impacts. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development requested the completion of an analysis mapping out the connection between climate change, child poverty in wealthy nations, and childhood development. We propose policy options to ameliorate potential high-risk harms to children in poverty living in OECD countries from climate change and mitigation of climate change. We also identify gaps in literature and research that should be pursued to better understand this urgent issue.