October 2013: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published a paper, titled ‘Exploring Climate Finance Effectiveness,’ which examines possible ways of measuring the effectiveness of public and private climate finance.

The paper is based on countries’ recognition of the need for increased climate finance for developing countries to enable them to transition to low-emissions, climate-resilient development pathways, and the commitment by developed countries to mobilize US$100 billion annually by 2020 for this purpose. It underlines that, although the quantity of climate finance is important, ensuring its quality or “effectiveness” is likewise crucial.

The paper then goes on to examine: what different communities regard as climate finance effectiveness; the policies or institutional pre-conditions that facilitate effectiveness; and how effectiveness can be monitored and evaluated. It looks at how the development community, the climate community and private sector stakeholders measure effectiveness or require effectiveness to be measured. It concludes that, although they often have different views of effectiveness, there is some common ground, particularly regarding the need for scaled-up climate finance, the need to include both public and private sources of finance, and the importance of self-sustainability and transparency.

In addition, the paper sets out a conceptual framework that could be used to monitor the results of climate finance interventions over different scales, including the global, national, portfolio/programme or project scale, as well as over different time horizons. It also highlights selected effectiveness indicators used across different institutions. [Publication: Exploring Climate Finance Effectiveness]