Public climate finance: a survey of systems to monitor and evaluate climate finance effectiveness

Multilateral and bilateral intermediaries are a crucial part of the climate finance landscape. In general, intermediaries are working hard to improve their monitoring and evaluation systems, but there is significant room for improvement, particularly to ensure that monitoring and evaluation is applied across the full lifecycle of projects and programmes. This paper examines the monitoring and evaluation systems applied by a selection of eight multilateral and bilateral intermediaries, as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reporting framework. The report argues that a key ingredient for a successful system is simplicity. It is important to balance the need for rigor and comprehensiveness with the recipient country’s capabilities and related transaction and administrative costs and to focus on information that is genuinely required to understand how well money is being spent and the impact it is having on tackling the global challenge of climate change.