Strategies for promoting climate change transparency and inclusive growth through south-south climate change cooperation

The implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris Agreement is anticipated to require a significant mobilisation of resources and commitments. The cost of adaptation in developing countries is now considered to be five times higher than previous estimates and the lack of transparency on climate finance flows is a potential source of corruption and rent-seeking. Unfortunately, most studies on climate change governance and climate finance focus on strategies for increasing climate investments thereby ignoring the roles that reforms to national and regional transparency frameworks could have in catalysing inclusive growth and improving resource utilisation. Achieving good governance and transparency in the delivery of national development programmes can increase the likelihood of a country to receive greater investments and climate finance. Consequently, this exploratory study aims to identify the strategies, approaches and governance frameworks across various sectors that can support State and Non-State Actors to develop and implement transparency frameworks that can enhance the implementation of the Paris Agreement and SDGs. The study discovered that transparency frameworks based on participatory community monitoring approaches and transnational monitoring committees within South-South Climate Cooperation modalities have potential to improve the implementation of the Paris Agreement and effectiveness in the use of climate finance. The paper findings suggest that South-South Climate Change Cooperation led transparency modalities for the Paris Agreement are multifunctional since they improve climate change transparency whilst improving SDGs implementation by promoting inclusive resilient economic growth (SDG 13) and inclusive global governance (SDG 16.8).