Institutional leadership and information sharing

Methodology

To conduct this assessment, we identified platforms, initiatives and forums that were relevant and then tracked them in a database and assessed these against our definition of ‘Transformational’. The report adopted the definition of ‘transformational’ from E3G’s report on designing smart green finance incentive schemes (2014), which incorporates many of the factors within other definitions including ambition, scale, market leverage, and replicability.  

According to the UK Government’s International Climate Fund, transformational impact was one that was “likely to change incentives to shift from one state to another” and there were four criteria– whether it was at scale, replicable, innovative, as well as leveraging and unlocking incentives. WRI defines it as “truly path-breaking, low-carbon energy development; where there has been a non-linear growth in renewable energy or energy efficiency; and/or where successes have been scaled up and replicated”. However, this definition is focused on mitigation while on the resilience side, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines transformational adaptation as “changing fundamental attributes of a system”. Meanwhile, the Green Climate Fund and GIZ define transformation as a ‘paradigm shift’.  

To be ‘Paris aligned’ an institution was involved in a number of transformational initiatives.  

To be ‘Transformational’, in terms of being a ‘pioneering’ champion we define this as being the first to pioneer a particular approach or initiative; whilst sharing information about this freely. Sharing information freely refers to communication about a transformational initiative to other institutions or actors in both the public and private sector to encourage uptake by other institutions and actors.  

Evolution of this indicator 

New initiatives or programmes are launched regularly and where an initiative has only recently been launched, further research would be required to assess the impacts.  Where a new or pioneering initiative had the potential to be transformational in future, the report describes this as a ‘potentially transformational’ initiative but further research on results would be needed.