Cities in Southeast Asia face various institutional barriers to cope with climate and water-related challenges. Several international programs for urban flood resilience therefore stress the importance of local institutional capacity building in initiating and delivering flood adaptation solutions. However, research to provide insights and recommendations into whether and how such international resilience programs could enable the building of local institutional capacities remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an analytical framework to study institutional capacity building by international resilience programs, focusing on intellectual, social and political capital. The central case is the development and implementation of the Water as Leverage (WaL) program in Semarang, Indonesia. Our main results show that this program was able to stimulate the integration of knowledge, building of local coalitions and creation of adaptation narratives, which contributed to developing six strategic climate resilience proposals. This paper reflects on institutional strengths and weaknesses, and concludes that although the WaL program introduced an innovative approach for collaboration between international experts, urban designers and local stakeholders, sustaining momentum for the reflexive learning process, involving city-based NGOs and establishing formal links with decision makers were key challenges that hindered the development of institutional capacities to implement the developed proposals.