On May 25-26, more than 300 participants from 57 countries participated in an online workshop organized by the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIF) Transformational Change Learning Partnership (TCLP). The workshop, Transformational Change and Climate Finance: Moving from Emerging Concepts to Advanced Practices, brought together experts from many major climate and development finance institutions and funds, country governments, academia, civil society, and the private sector for interactive sessions exploring what it will take to translate emerging commitment and concepts for advancing more transformational climate finance into practice and results.
As we reflect back on the workshop sessions and discussions, we want to elevate five key insights that spotlight the path ahead for leveraging climate finance to advance transformational change and impact.
Insight 1: Leverage the momentum for transformational change to translate concepts to practice. Momentum for transformational change is growing rapidly across major climate finance and development institutions and there is strong convergence across emerging transformation concepts. Officials from institutions such as the CIF, the UK Government, the Inter-American Development Bank, GIZ, Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Green Climate Fund described how their organizations are moving to focus work on transformational changes that enable systemic change and scaling beyond the impacts of specific interventions. The concepts and design principles emerging from these efforts—such as the TCLP’s five dimensions of transformational change, GIZ’s TransformAbilities, and the Global Commons Alliance’s Ingredients of Systems Change, among others—vary in their framing but converge and align in powerful ways. While mapping to connect these frameworks will be useful, it is clear that the pivot from ideas to practice, experimentation, and learning is the way forward.
Insight 2: Elevate people in the system transformations needed for climate action. The climate finance community needs to think broadly about systems change in ways that elevate social and economic needs, justice, and equity. Climate finance and action cannot afford to ignore the broader social and economic systems and societal needs that are deeply intertwined with the systems changes needed to achieve net zero emissions and climate resilience. To realize the benefits of climate action and ensure their durability, work on transformational change must be deeply integrated with work on just transitions. While this approach is easy to propose, the work ahead will be challenging as people and institutions confront competing priorities, trade-offs, and shifts in decision-making and power arrangements.
Insight 3: Advance programmatic approaches supported by long-term planning. Supporting transformational change requires programmatic approaches informed by long-term planning that targets broad-based systems changes. Workshop participants repeatedly spoke to the power of informing and aligning near-term action and investments with long-term planning and programmatic approaches. This approach is exemplified by the current work across multilateral development banks to advance “Paris Agreement alignment” in country programs, by the CIF’s programmatic approach to country investments, and the World Bank’s emergent work to align investments with the climate-informed Outlook 2050. As the focus of climate action evolves to address underlying systems change, entrenched barriers, and hard-to-decarbonize sectors, attention to long-horizon planning and pathway analyses can help create real options and illuminate risks.
Insight 4: Be bold, experiment, and learn and adapt constantly. Climate and development finance institutions need to be bold in their work and processes, experimenting with flexible, adaptive approaches that are deeply supported by learning. There is no recipe or playbook for advancing transformational change. Context matters. However, navigating change in interrelated, dynamic, and complex systems can be informed by insights and principles drawn from past experience. Bold experimentation in the institutional programs and processes that support climate finance and projects will be vital to amplify the impact of interventions in the face of the urgency of the climate crisis. For example, innovative partnerships, new analytic approaches such as systems and actor mapping, and flexible funding approaches can be explored to support rapid scaling of promising interventions. As one speaker from GIZ noted, “let’s act our way into new ways of thinking.” Additional work is needed to transform evaluative practice to integrate strong evidence collection, analysis, and learning approaches throughout project cycles to accelerate feedback and adaptation.
Insight 5: Work collaboratively, together and apart – keeping the work at the center. Workshop participants emphasized the value of focused work through the TCLP and aligned initiatives to translate emerging transformational change concepts into practices, resources, guidance, and program and project experimentation. The TCLP—and the diverse participants engaged in the TCLP community—can play an important ongoing role in connecting the wide array of work to advance transformational change in climate action. At times this will involve working in distributed and focused communities of practice and at other times there will be value in diverse partners and communities of practice coming together to share and challenge emerging ideas and practices.
The TCLP offers a convening space for enhancing and sharing transformational change practices. The recent workshop and associated insights highlight the role that the TCLP can play to support a pivot from early work on concepts and to accelerate the focus on practice and action. The TCLP, as a learning partnership, will mobilize collaborative efforts to develop practitioner-focused guidance, resources, and experimentation. We invite you to join the TCLP in this journey! Please contact the TCLP Team (ciftclp@worldbank.org) or subscribe to our mailing list if you are interested in participating in or keeping informed of the TCLP’s efforts.