Description
Climate finance is critical for developing countries to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Therefore, understanding the specific climate finance needs and priorities of developing countries is essential for international climate cooperation and justice. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that countries submit under the Paris Agreement provide information on national climate targets and developing countries often include monetary estimates of climate finance needs. Although there is a large literature on the international political economy (IPE) of climate policy, less attention has been paid to the political economy of climate finance transparency in NDCs. In this paper, we propose a framework for measuring the transparency of developing countries' climate finance needs and develop the Climate Finance Needs Specificity (CLIFS) dataset by manually analyzing 244 initial and updated NDCs from 133 developing countries. We then combine insights from economics, political science, and climate finance literature to examine the underlying IPE forces shaping the evolution of climate finance transparency in the context of the Paris Agreement and broader international climate policy. In particular, we highlight the distinct roles of international actors (e.g., donor countries, multilateral institutions) and domestic actors (e.g., bureaucratic processes, federal competition). We estimate that climate finance needs range from USD427 billion to USD659 billion per year by 2030. We find that governance systems significantly influence the transparency of climate finance and that different actors interact in multiple ways to negotiate approaches to international climate finance.
