This document focuses on the role of local institutions in adaptation to climate change. It does so under the belief that climate impacts will affect disadvantaged social groups more disproportionately, and that local institutions centrally influence how different social groups gain access to and are able to use assets and resources. It suggests that adaptation to climate change is inevitably local and that institutions influence adaptation and climate vulnerability in three critical ways: they structure impacts and vulnerability, they mediate between individual and collective responses to climate impacts and thereby shape outcomes of adaptation, and they act as the means of delivery of external resources to facilitate adaptation, and thus govern access to such resources.