One key question in the political economy of climate adaptation is: how to allocate adaptation funding when the costs exceed the benefits? The literature notes that climate adaptation provides (mostly) private benefits – as only specific communities or even specific households are adapted – but comes at (mostly) public costs: government funding of adaptation infrastructure. Since the benefits are concentrated and the costs widespread, adaptation spending may be used to provide targeted benefits to politically salient constituencies – a form of ‘pork barrel’ politics. Yet we lack studies assessing this claim empirically. This paper studies the implementation of a reform of flood risk management (FRM) funding introduced in England in 2011 by the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition government, called Partnership Funding (PF). With PF, government matches local councils that raise money (via levies, private contributions, or donations) to fund FRM projects that are not cost-effective from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint yet are deemed locally worthwhile. Using data on all FRM projects approved in England between 2012 and 2022 and panel data analysis, we find that: 1) The higher the Conservative vote in a constituency, the higher the percentage of PF in the overall expenditure for FRM projects in that constituency; 2) When a local government switches to Conservative, their PF-funded allocations increase; 3) Local contributions are reimbursed to local governments via a separate budget line, anyway. We did not, however, find evidence of funding allocations to ‘swing’ constituencies. Rather than ‘pork barrel’, the reform appears aimed at redistributing public funding for FRM to co-partisans.