Evidence of climate change is overwhelming and South East Queensland is highly vulnerable to its impacts. The need for a collaborative approach for developing and implementing effective local climate change adaptation plans has been widely acknowledged in the literature, yet, on the ground examples are still limited in number. Noosa Climate Action Plan (NCAP) is a unique community driven plan which combines top-down and bottom-up approaches and is supported by a wide range of stakeholders. This paper evaluates the NCAP process in order to evaluate its success as a collaborative planning process. In order to accomplish this, first a review of the relevant literature identified factors that make collaborations successful. Then the NCAP process was analysed against these criteria using document review and in-depth interviews with well-informed participants of the planning process. The findings of this research reveal the presence of many of the factors identified from the literature in the NCAP process and these are viewed as important factors in the success of this process by the participants.