Published by
Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN)
Year
2016

NAMA Development and Stakeholder Engagement

Mitigation is the driver behind NAMAs, but other benefits are more important domestically – to the extent that too prominent a focus on climate change might compromise buy-in and ownership. NAMAs so far have typically targeted change in one or more specific sectors and as such are complementary to economy-wide interventions such as subsidy reform, carbon taxes and markets. Because of that sectoral focus stakeholder engagement requires close cooperation between environment ministries, sectoral line ministries, and coordinating ministries (i.e. planning and treasury). In that sense current stakeholder engagement for NAMAs can be seen as a testing ground for full-scale coordinated implementation of pre-2020 ambitions and the NDCs.

The scene is now set for NAMAs to play a meaningful and valuable role in the coming years. 2015 saw the signing of the Paris Agreement and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. These developments have the potential to transform our achievement of climate and development goals, and good NAMAs, which have both mitigation and development outcomes at their heart, can be a tool for channelling climate finance and achieving country-driven low-emission development outcomes. But to enable the broader uptake of the NAMA concept that is necessary for this to happen at scale, the NAMA development community needs to get much better at communicating the varied benefits of NAMAs to key stakeholders. NAMAs need to be seen not as the preserve of climate change focal ministries and a small community of practitioners, but as a way of achieving transformational sectoral change with multiple wins across climate and broader development spheres.