Locally-led Adaptation views community-based organizations as a key delivery mechanism for redressing climate injustice by shifting power over climate adaptation to local people. This research examines how farmer groups act as formations for collective adaptation while simultaneously reproducing social hierarchies. The research adopts a political ecology lens which reveals that self-organisation through bonding practices, such as peer learning, information sharing and resource pooling in farmer groups, emerges in response to compounding climate and non-climate stresses in market gardening. However, groups are embedded within a multi-scalar governance network where local outcomes are conditioned by national and international programming and finance frameworks for climate adaptation. Externally driven conditionalities attached to accessing adaptation resources produce local tensions that enable elite capture and membership regulations which exclude some farmers from adaptation benefits.