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The purpose of this study is to investigate how political and technical factors influence climate finance coordination in different country contexts. Emerging scholarly and policy literature calls for the improved coordination of climate finance to enhance the effectiveness of multiple sources of funding for adaptation and mitigation purposes, with country ownership over coordination emerging as a potential approach. However, few studies have examined how climate finance coordination unfolds at the national level in developing countries. This paper presents findings from a comparative assessment of climate finance coordination practices in Kenya and Zambia, drawing on semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and relevant literature. Specifically, the paper investigates how political and technical forces shape climate finance coordination in contexts with varying country ownership over the coordination process. We find that political factors relating to power dynamics, framings of climate finance, and vested interests play a strong role in shaping how actors interact, hampering coordination efforts within the climate finance landscape in both countries. This adds a new dimension to calls for greater country ownership, which we suggest needs to be paired with a critical examination of political struggles and contestation. Underlying political factors relating to conflicting vested interests, different framings and discourses, political will, and power dynamics play a substantive and overarching role in shaping climate finance coordination in Kenya and Zambia. These political factors limit the extent to which greater country ownership translates to better or more effective coordination of climate finance; as such, ownership needs to be examined in the context of political struggles and contestation. Instead of just aiming to improve coordination through more formalized coordination structures, capacity building and reduced fragmentation, countries also need to be more transparent and acknowledge the deep-seated interests within the climate finance landscape, to make visible the winners and losers of various coordination mechanisms and structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which the existence of a polycentric climate governance regime in Pakistan has enabled diverse framings of climate justice to emerge and be operationalized within policymaking. A two-part analysis is conducted through systematic coding and textual analysis of interview transcripts and policy documents. Firstly, an analysis based on climate justice framings reveals that, whilst national governmental actors predominantly adopt an international framing of climate justice, non-state actors have increasingly adopted vulnerability, human rights and transformational framings of justice, thereby supporting the theory that polycentricity is widening the space for voicing diverse framings. Secondly, a polycentric governance-based analysis reveals that several institutional barriers limit the ability of non-state actors to operationalize these framings, particularly capacity and resource constraints, limits of scale and scope, changing legislation and the unequivocal power held by the state. Hence, Pakistan's overarching climate change strategy prioritizes justice between countries, while obscuring domestic inequalities, poverty and vulnerability, which are only addressed by non-state actors through isolated activities rather than in a coordinated manner within national policy. This finding suggests that polycentric governance can diversify climate discourse, but also that the intergovernmental climate regime may reinforce the nation state's international framings of justice at the expense of domestic justice concerns. Key policy insights Non-state actors within the polycentric climate governance regime in Pakistan are increasingly adopting framings of climate justice beyond those of the nation state, thereby bringing attention to issues of domestic poverty, inequality and vulnerability. Differences in power between state and non-state actors limit the extent to which different justice issues can be addressed through nationally and internationally-led climate policy. There are limitations to the ability of national-level polycentric climate governance regimes, when embedded in intergovernmental negotiations, to engage in redistributing power and advocating for different framings and dimensions of justice being raised by local actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 article, we study the coordination efforts of the two most important multilateral climate funds, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF), on the global level as well as within two recipient countries, Kenya and Zambia. The CIF and the GCF are anchored within the World Bank and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, respectively, 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 depoliticization are that both funds coordinate mainly with actors with similar preferences, and consequently, coordination did not achieve its objectives. The article 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]