Supporting Just Transitions to a Sustainable Water Sector in Bolivia

This case study forms part of a series exploring how Climate Investment Funds (CIF) investments have contributed to—or interacted with—efforts to ensure just transitions. The study examines Bolivia’s water resource management challenges and highlights significant conflicts and disparities in the current allocation of water that the transition will need to address. Many low-income households in urban peripheries and rural areas lack access to drinking water, many farmers cannot irrigate their crops, and water pollution is a serious problem. The case study draws out lessons from CIF investments in Bolivia’s water sector, focusing on CIF-funded projects under the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR). The projects examined in this study were not developed with an explicit focus on just transitions, so the analysis does not evaluate whether they achieved them. Instead, it applies a just transitions lens to learn from experience and inform future efforts by CIF and others to explicitly support just transitions in the water sector, in Bolivia and elsewhere.