Sep 22, 2021
The TCLP hosted its fourth event of 2021 focusing on transformational change in relation to climate action and released a powerful, new report detailing key insights and analysis on the topic.
Transformational change is necessary and urgent as the climate crisis continues to devastate the planet. Fundamental system change is required to bring about development pathways that are climate neutral, inclusive, equitable, and ultimately sustainable. The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) aims to drive transformational change across all its funded programs and activities. And the CIF-created TCLP works to support this objective through global collaboration, facilitated learning, and analysis with a diverse set of organizations and individuals from around the world.
The September, TCLP-wide webinar gathered over 80 participants who learned about CIF questions meant to guide and develop new transformational change programs.
Michael Robert Ward, CIF Senior Evaluation and Sustainability Specialist, and TCLP co-lead, stated, "It’s a privilege to spend time in discussion with TCLP participants. There is such a depth of insight. The ongoing work is to take these concepts, questions, and signals to create guidance to support greater transformational intent in project design, implementation, evaluation.”
TCLP Interest Groups - Clean Energy; Resilience and Landscapes; and Just Transitions – also had the opportunity to engage in small-group breakouts where they discussed potential outcomes and processes that could come from transformational change advancements. Key discourse focused on the integration of renewable energy into national grids; the relationship between urgency and equity in energy transitions; and the vulnerability of nature-based livelihoods in the context of climate change.
Tim Larson, president of Ross Strategic, and TCLP Lead Facilitator, believes that “There is a clear pathway and opportunity over the coming months to shape and refine this guidance to help equip partners to integrate or to know what transformational change may look like in the specific contexts where climate finance programs are taking place.”
In addition to the webinar, the TCLP released its, ‘Transformational Change Concepts Brief’. The brief provides TCLP’s working definition of transformational change and the five essential dimensions needed for climate action to be transformational. While the five dimensions vary in emphasis and significance, depending on context and timing, they must always be present in some context. They are:
- Relevance - Alignment with and attentiveness to goals and context through time.
- Systemic Change - Fundamental shifts in system structures and functions.
- Speed - Accelerate impacts to achieve the appropriate speed of change.
- Scale - Contextually large transformational change processes and impacts.
- Adaptive Sustainability - Robustness, resilience, and adaptiveness of change.
Additionally, the report looks at the relationships between the dimensions and eight key insights relevant to transformational change for climate action. Some of these insights include:
- Transformation at the depth and breadth needed to address the climate crisis is a very ambitious global goal, requiring changes spanning natural and human systems as well as on all scales.
- Shifts in societal and economic power relations, decision-making authority, inclusion, and distributional effects are common in transformations.
- Changes relevant to transformation can occur at many levels, although scale matters in climate action.
- Transformation takes place at different timeframes and speeds. Change processes are not linear.
For a more in-depth look and analysis of TCLP’s transformational change definition, five dimensions, and eight key insights please click on the link below.
