WIDER Working Paper No. 2013/046 Foreign aid for climate change related capacity building

The current climate change crisis has repeatedly alerted mankind to the urgency of tackling this pressing global challenge before it is too late. Developing countries, which have contributed negligibly to the present climate change problem are, nevertheless, hit the hardest by, and are most vulnerable to, its negative effects. Despite the ongoing efforts of foreign aid to promote capacity building in the developing countries, little is known about the effectiveness of foreign aid in terms of developing climate change related capacity, what lessons and experiences we can draw from past and present aid projects, what areas of foreign aid we can improve to boost capacity building and what successful aid experiences can be applied to a wider context. This paper aims to bridge this research gap by investigating what works, what could work, what is scalable and what is transferrable in foreign aid for capacity building