Disclosure or obfuscation in climate finance? Assessing performance in multilateral transparency arrangements

Ambitious climate action by developing countries hinges on the provision of climate finance from developed countries. Elaborate transparency arrangements are set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to track climate financing provision and receipt. The assumption is that these transparency arrangements provide countries and the international community with the necessary tools to hold each other accountable for their actions and conduct in this realm. However, the relationship between transparency and accountability is more assumed than empirically proven, including in the area of climate financing. While there are several global non-state tracking initiatives for climate finance, such as Climate Funds Update, it is essential to interrogate what countries themselves are revealing in these dedicated multilateral transparency processes. Is it useful to have transparency of support, as devised within these arrangements, and for whom is it useful? The paper builds on the analytical framework of Ciplet et al. (2018) that critically assesses transparency’s transformative power in the realm of climate finance. This framework argues that specific norms dominate the uptake of climate finance transparency and subsequent accountability mechanisms. Their cascade and implementation significantly impacts upon the transformative capability of transparency in shedding light on the delivery of adequate and equitable climate financing. We build on this analysis by focusing specifically on what countries are disclosing to each other about climate finance through participation in UNFCCC transparency arrangements. This article focuses on both developed and developing countries, and includes participation in all stages of the UNFCCC transparency arrangements, including a final face-to-face public account-giving session. The analysis focuses on eighteen countries that have completed a full UNFCCC reporting and review cycle in the period 2014-2020: Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Norway, Papa New Guinea, South Africa, Togo, the UK, and the US. There have been four cycles of reporting and review where the selected countries have participated, although to varying degrees. The methods consist of analyzing countries’ transparency reports; the reviews/analyses of submitted reports by technical experts; and video recordings of face-to-face account-giving sessions. The coding software Atlas ti is applied to identify themes and patterns related to state-to-state reporting on climate finance within these transparency arrangements, a gap in the literature thus far. As the 2015 Paris Agreement relies on similar transparency arrangements, critical interrogation is needed of how countries perform with regard to reporting on climate finance; and whether and how this helps to further (what type of) accountability of donor and recipient countries.