Multilateral climate finance coordination: Politics and depoliticization in practice

The governance of public climate finance for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries is fragmented on both the international and national levels, with a high diversity of actors with overlapping mandates, preferences and areas of expertise. In the absence of one unifying actor or institution, coordination among actors has emerged as a response to this fragmentation. In this paper, we study the coordination efforts of the two most important multilateral climate funds, the Climate Investment Funds and the Green Climate Fund on the global level as well as within two recipient countries, Kenya and Zambia. The Climate Investment Funds and the Green Climate Funds are anchored within respectively the World Bank and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and represent two diverging perspectives on climate finance. We find that on both levels coordination was depoliticized by treating it as a technical exercise rendering invisible the political divergences among actors. The implications of this depoliticisation are that both funds mainly coordinate with actors with similar preferences, and consequently coordination did not achieve its objectives. The paper contributes to the literatures on coordination, climate finance and environmental governance by showing how a response to the fragmentation of climate governance did not overcome political fault lines, but rather reinforced them.