Paola Vasconi Reca
Climate Governance Adviser, EUROCLIMA+ Programme
San José, Costa Rica, August 31, 2018. Moving forward with the effective implementation of climate commitments (NDCs) and compliance with the Paris Agreement, requires national frameworks that contemplate the roles and functions of all levels of government. On this path, it is essential to integrate the subnational levels in national climate policies, while giving them the possibility of contributing to policy development and the multi-level country governance process.
Bearing this in mind the Climate Governance component of the EUROCLIMA+ Programme, in which GIZ is one of the implementing agencies, has developed a generic training module to strengthen Vertical Coordination in the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), one of the key challenges for Latin America in the fulfilment of its climate commitments in the context of the Paris Agreement. “Through this training programme, EUROCLIMA+ aims to help strengthen the climate policy governance framework and the integration of vertical coordination between actors at national and subnational levels as a central element for the advancement of NDCs in the region,” said Silvia Brugger, GIZ representative for the EUROCLIMA+ Climate Governance Component.
During August of this year, and in the framework of the training workshops addressed to the national coordinators of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM), carried out by the European Union’s International Urban Cooperation Programme (IUC) in collaboration with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), EUROCLIMA+ carried out the first pilots of the Training Module to strengthen Vertical Coordination, “with the aim of making the methodological and content adjustments necessary to achieve a training programme that responds to the needs and realities of EUROCLIMA+ beneficiary countries”, Ms. Brugger added.
The workshops took place in Lima, Peru, from August 20 to 23, and in San José, Costa Rica, from August 27 to 30. These were attended by national representatives, mainly from municipalities of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru, and from Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico respectively. Each workshop lasted 4 days: the first three days were given by IUC and JRC, in order to provide Latin American cities with a common platform that would allow them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and ensure access to sustainable energy, from the development of their respective “Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAP)”. The last day, meanwhile, was led by EUROCLIMA+ with the training module to strengthen Vertical Coordination for the implementation of the NDCs, whose main objective is to provide the necessary conceptual framework so that decision makers and implementers of climate actions in the different levels of government reflect on their governance processes and the challenges for their implementation, in order to think in the future about specific solutions for effective multilevel governance.
The training module was facilitated by EUROCLIMA+ consultant Cristóbal Reveco, who said: “framing the discussion on climate governance in the context of National Contributions (NDCs) is a very useful exercise for municipalities, since it invites reflection on the feasibility of contributing to local mitigation and adaptation efforts under national guidelines.” In addition, Reveco stated that “this process invites us to analyse the coherence and quality of the dialogue between different levels of decision-making, enabling debate on the acceptance of national commitments and their relevance at the level of the territories, and it allows identifying spaces for participation, not only in the implementation of projects, but also for the municipalities to influence the design of these instruments”.
Finally, the EUROCLIMA+ consultant stressed that “in some cases, NDCs even indicate the generation of climate change laws. These are spaces where the participation of the municipalities is central, since it is in the territory where the sectoral agendas are mainstreamed through territorial planning and administration practices.”
It should be noted that the training module was very well received in both workshops; allowing the generation of reflections, discussions and active participation. In both meetings, the progress, challenges and opportunities experienced by the Latin American countries, and especially the municipalities, for making progress in climate action in both mitigation and adaptation could be verified. Regarding the challenges among the municipalities of the region, the diagnosis is quite coincidental: lack of access to financing, specific technical capacities and political support to advance climate action. “In this sense, the Vertical Coordination training module aims show that the National Contributions (NDC) are opportunities for synchronising the efforts of actors from different institutions and levels of governance, and it raises the profile of spaces for municipal participation, for example, in the political demands and technical actions that aim to increase the ambition of the countries’ climate goals,” Silvia Brugger emphasised.