What is transformational change and how can we design a way of achieving it? This new toolkit is a start

With time rapidly disappearing to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists and decision makers agree that we urgently need more ambitious climate action. One of the key questions to emerge is: how can we go beyond incremental change and inertia, and aim instead for the transformation of our economies and societies?

To achieve this transformational change, concessional climate resources have become a key tool. This term is used by the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) to foster strategic interventions that accelerate or shift development pathways toward a low-carbon and climate-resilient future.

This concept can enhance the dialogue to spark concrete action with systemic, large-scale, and sustainable impacts that offer the best chance of meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement at the scale and rate the world needs.

How do we get there? And is it possible to design climate investments with greater potential for transformational change?

To answer these questions, the IDB Group, comprised of the Inter-American Development Bank, IDB Invest and IDB Lab, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), with the support of the CIFs, have developed a new toolkit called “Designing for Transformation: A Practice-Oriented Toolkit for Mainstreaming Transformational Change in Program and Project Preparation Processes”.

The publication will support finance practitioners to become familiarized with the concept, its framework, and reflect upon ways to apply it during project and program preparation activities. These include designing the theory of change; performing market, economic, and gender analyses; and designing stakeholder consultations.

This guidance is presented as a toolkit, with a series of stand-alone guiding sections for various tools, methods, and approaches that multilateral development banks often use in project preparation. Each section uses real-world examples of investments in renewable energy, sustainable forest management, climate resilience, and other climate-related technologies to illustrate how the different dimensions of transformational change can be strengthened at the stage of design.

The development of the toolkit was based on eight case studies, which were analyzed using concepts and findings developed by the Evaluation and Learning Initiative of the Climate Investment Funds (E&L CIFs). The toolkit’s production was commissioned by the E&L and CIFs; and was jointly facilitated and supervised by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the IDB Group.

Click here to download the complete document.