Page - (000049) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

benefits to countries (ADB/IED2014, p. 21). TheReport on Effectiveness of the Swiss International Cooperation in Climate Change (2014, IV) highlighted that groups of projects with strong scores for mitigation effectiveness were found to include projects that targeted the rehabilitation of hydropower systems and power systemswith direct energy efficiencybenefits and enabling impacts for renewable energy promotion, the strengthening of measuring, reporting and verification capacity and carbonmarket readiness, the use of knowledge sharing among cities and companies, and the rehabilitation and re-deployment of used Swiss trams to other countries. A Fully Supportive Enabling Environment Is Necessary W€orlen’s (2014) meta- analysis ofmitigation interventions led to a systematic overviewof all thebarriers to change – providing a “theory of no change” – an explanation of whymarket change or transformation was not happening. The theory of no change demon- strated that introduction of technology will only be successful if all potential barriers for change have been tackled. The ICF evaluation showed that in more thanhalf ofCTFcountries, policy, regulatory, andmacroeconomic situationshave thepotential to slowdownor limit transformationand replication.These countries have supportive policies in place that provide building blocks, but lack implementing regulations specifying key details of the regulatory environment, weakening the potential for immediate replication. Non-investment-grade credit ratings are also a limiting factor in somecountries (ICF2014,X).ADB’sClimate TechnologyFinanceCenter (CTFC)also encountereddifficulties during its design and launch.Barriers includefinancial constraints, insufficient knowledgebase and expertise, and inadequacies of public policies, regulations, and enforcement (ADB/IED2014, p. 21). ACrucial Supporting Factor Is the Availability of Financing If loans for invest- ment in new technology are unavailable, then this technologywill not bewidely adopted. The Fifth Overall Performance Study of the GEF (2014) showed that mainstreaming typically tookplacebecauseoffinancial incentivesprovidedby the national government to adopt the technologies (p. 54). The IDB/OVE evaluation notes thatpromoting thedevelopmentof small-scaleenergyefficiencyprojectshas proven to be more difficult, as small firms face high transaction costs and low financial returns from these investments (partly because of energy subsidies), and they require access to long-termfinancing (2014, p. 67). TheCIFevaluationcouldnot seeaclearpath towardsbroaderadoptionofmany technologies tested and demonstrated in CIF support, because these projects and programmes lacked a convincing theory of change that would explain how repli- cationandmarket changeand transformationwould takeplace.This seemsat least partly due to investment criteria, for example in CTF, that focus on quantifying GHG emission reductions rather than causal pathways to transformative change (ICF2014,x).ThefocusonGHGemissionreductionsisvisibleinotherevaluations as well – it points to the possibility that technology is easier judged on its contribution to climate change mitigation, without full recognition that any 28 R.D. vandenBerg andL.Cando-Noordhuizen