May 27, 2022
Identifying and understanding the operational barriers and solutions in climate finance can enhance project design as well as ensure the overall effectiveness and efficiency of implementing climate programs. It can also help practitioners and decision-makers be more informed and responsive to the rapidly evolving social, political, economic, and even geographical contexts of the climate crisis.
For this reason, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) have launched the Climate Delivery Initiative (CDI) — an analytical platform to identify, study, record, workshop, and respond to the barriers and solutions often associated with climate finance programs. The initiative focuses on the operational barriers that significantly impact project implementation, maps and dissects them, and then analyzes and catalogs the responses to contribute to overcoming these barriers. It aims to support policymakers and operational teams in designing and deploying more primitive, nuanced, and responsive climate interventions.
CDI consists of three components. The first component is its theoretical base which provides a research and analytical framework to explore operational barriers. It pulls together a taxonomy of potential delivery challenges that works in tandem with theoretical data within which to situate the identified operational barriers. This information feeds into an inventory of previously identified and studied barriers and solutions from CIF and other knowledge bases.
It builds on the substantive work conducted by its predecessor and previous CIF partner, the Global Delivery Initiative (GDI). The GDI gathered metadata from over 10,000 projects across the World Bank Group (WBG), and catalogued delivery challenges by name and prevalence, as well as verifying theoretical definitions and real-world samples.
The second CDI component is a case studies series that connects the theoretical information to real-world data and operations, including analyses on how and where various drivers, incentives, or innovations intersect or evolve.
The case study series feeds into the third component, the Climate Delivery Labs and learning fora. Here, the wealth of CDI content, including theoretical, taxonomical, and case study findings will be shared with various user groups such as policymakers, academics, or project implementors. Through convening a variety of knowledge events, the delivery labs will focus on the pressing themes, challenges, and potential solutions that occur in climate project delivery. The insights and results from these activities will feed back into the first component to build and strengthen the research and theoretical base. Additionally, it will inform future climate projects, both within the CIF and for others working in climate finance sector.
The initiative’s composite structure is a deliberately circular and self-reinforcing one. CDI aims to reach climate stakeholders directly, extract valuable operational lessons for practitioners and organizations, and ensure that evidence-based insights inform the responsive development and implementation of climate finance projects.
