The climate crisis requires urgent action to avoid further negative impacts on our planet and societies. A gradual change is not sufficient to cope with the current crisis. What is needed is a transformational change.
Transformational change is a catalytic change in systems and behaviours resulting from disruptive climate actions that enable actors to shift to carbon-neutral pathways.
The NAMA Facility supports transformational change that has strong national ownership and is in line with the Paris Agreement and countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions. This type of change requires taking high risks – hence the NAMA Facility’s international climate finance to support actors pursuing such change processes. Transformational change goes beyond individual projects or interventions and requires built-in incremental learning processes that allow fearless learning and mechanisms that trigger a self-reinforcing dynamic and prevent reversion.
Operationalisation
The potential for transformational change of a NAMA Support Project needs to be defined by the NSPs and is assessed at the NSP Outline and the NSP Proposal stages as part of the assessment of the overall ambition of the project.
The factors relevant to reaching transformational change include the NSP’s potential to have a demonstrable effect, promote learning, achieve a catalytic effect by ensuring replicability, scalability, and the sustainability of the intervention, thereby helping sectors and countries move towards a carbon-neutral pathway.
As part of the Evaluation and Learning Exercises, the Transformational Change Measurement Framework has been defined to facilitate the evaluation of the NSP-induced transformational change. It is based on the NAMA Facility working definition of transformational change and the theory of change. The framework provides guidance to the ELE teams on how to characterise the elements and evidence of transformational change. Since the overall potential for transformational change depends on the combination of various factors over time, the framework follows a qualitative evaluation approach.
