First Steps toward a Quality of Climate Finance Scorecard (QUODA-CF) - Working Paper 335

Are climate finance contributor countries, multilateral aid  agencies and specialized funds using widely accepted best  practices in foreign assistance? How is it possible to measure and compare international climate finance contributions when there are as yet no established metrics or agreed  definitions of the quality of climate finance? As a subjective  metric, quality can mean different things to different stakeholders, while of donor countries, recipients and institutional  actors may place quality across a broad spectrum of objectives. This subjectivity makes the assessment of the quality  of climate finance contributions a useful and necessary exercise, but one that has many challenges.

This work seeks to enhance the development of common  definitions and metrics of the quality of climate finance,  to understand what we can about those areas where climate finance information is available and shine a light on  the areas where there is a severe dearth of data. Allowing  for comparisons of the use of best practices across funding institutions in the climate sector could begin a process  of benchmarking performance, fostering learning across  institutions and driving improvements when incorporated  in internal evaluation protocols of those institutions.