The politics of climate finance coordination

At last year’s global climate change conference in Glasgow a number of the world’s wealthy countries committed to increase their climate finance to the Global South. While this is positive, there are growing concerns that climate finance needs to be better coordinated in order to ensure that the funds – which come from many different sources – are used effectively and do not overlap or contradict each other.

Although numerous reports and papers have called for better coordination of climate finance, most tend to approach coordination as a technical and administrative issue. In this new article in Climate Policy, researchers investigate how not only technical but also political factors influence climate finance coordination in Kenya and Zambia.

In particular, the article discusses the relationship between donors and recipient governments in the coordination process, and the role of country ownership in coordination. The researchers find that political factors, such as how climate finance is framed and how vested interests are accommodated, play a critical role in shaping how coordination develops and how actors engage in coordination.

Technical measures to enhance coordination – such as developing capacity and new organizational mechanisms – are therefore not enough in themselves. There is also a need to acknowledge that climate finance coordination is an inherently political process, and to address it as such. This includes acknowledging that coordination is not a mundane administrative task but a governance process; that interests inevitably diverge; and that decision-making processes must allow for negotiation and political deliberation between involved actors.

The article is Open Access and can be downloaded free from the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2022.2098227

The research is part of the collaborative “Share or Spare” project led by Lund University and funded by the Swedish Research Council. More information on the project can be found here: https://www.svet.lu.se/en/research/research-projects/share-or-spare-explaining-nature-and-determinants-climate-finance-coordination