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Working across scales: Learning from seven years of climate compatible development in Asia

The adoption of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Change Agreement, all in 2015, highlights the strength of international commitment behind climate compatible development. Given the immense scale of the opportunity, and the challenges globally in responding to this, John Colvin and Christina McDonagh argue in this new report by Emerald Network for CDKN for the value of stimulating climate compatible development initiatives at multiple levels of governance, from the local to the national, as well as the global. They call for designing these initiatives in ways that maximise the synergies of effective coordination between the levels. Seven years of work by CDKN in India, Indonesia, Nepal and Pakistan offer a wealth of experience to build on. The report looks across 10 CDKN initiatives that worked at multiple scales, some focusing initially on local-level piloting, and then scaling up and out, others focusing from the outset on innovation at multiple levels of governance. As a way to stimulate and share learning with the reader, the authors treat these 10 initiatives as a set of ‘design experiments’, all of which have benefitted the many and diverse stakeholders involved, but with some of these initiatives leading to more effective multi-level pathways of climate compatible development than others.

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