TERMS OF REFERENCE Research On People’s Ndcs. Experiences Of Civil Society Involvement In National Climate Plans – The Case Of Zimbabwe
Consultancy, Research Jobs
Job Description
Purpose and Background: Many countries have now submitted their updated National Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the UN in line with the 2020 deadline. These documents are public commitments, and follow a relatively fixed format, which makes them comparable at international level. But they also represent the outcome of a national process. In some cases, the process to create and update the NDCs has been participatory and inclusive of a wide range of stakeholders, but in others the process has been less inclusive. With weak participation by civil society and other stakeholders, there may be:
• less ownership for, or awareness of the NDC commitments from stakeholders across society.
• Risky or far-reaching plans being included in the NDC (such as land-intensive carbon-offset projects or massive transformation of food, agriculture and energy sectors) without considering the impacts on affected sectors.
• commitments on mitigation or adaptation which fall short of the civil society demands for climate justice
• Failure to credibly consider and address gender, ethnicity, regions, conflict dynamics etc.
• Plans which are inadequately costed; or where the international finance needed (vs. domestic finance) is not be indicated.
- Exclusion from the NDC process endangers parts of the population who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but who may remain unsupported, for instance, in terms of climate adaptation plans.
- It is therefore important to understand how inclusive NDC processes have been, and important questions remain about whether the quality of national climate responses can be improved through empowering understanding and engagement in NDCs by civil society, and by women, youth and indigenous peoples. The purpose of the research, therefore, will be
• To get a more detailed picture of how participatory and inclusive NDCs have been in a representative sample of developing countries
• To determine if lack of participation by civil society has been a widespread problem in the way NDCs have been prepared, and to understand the implications of this.
Why now? In 2023 NDCs will be looked at in the Global Stocktake, a process under which all progress toward UN climate change targets is to be considered. That makes 2023 an opportune moment to consider how well owned and rooted the NDCs are at national level, and to push for improvements.
Target Audience: Civil society, including partners of Oxfam; Governments updating or implementing their NDCs; experts who are assisting governments with their NDC; donors who are providing climate finance to support conditional financial needs expressed in NDCs.
Duties and Responsibilities
Proposition
Short (c. 75 words) on the paper’s core argument and policy recommendation(s)
Include specific gender/women’s rights points here if possible.
NDCs are failing to be genuinely inclusive. We need to convene and empower a wide range of CSO actors in developing countries (eg. women’s rights orgs, land rights movements, indigenous peoples, farmer organisations, journalist networks etc) to engage more deeply in the development, implementation, and monitoring of national climate plans (which, through NDCs, are formal government commitments under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement).
Qualifications and Experience
• Demonstrated skills and experience in research and report writing.
• Fluency in written and spoken English
• S/he/they must hold at least a Master’s degree, international development, economics, strategic studies, climate, environment and natural resource management, energy policy or a related field. A PhD will be an added advantage.
• Demonstrated experience working with policy mechanisms including climate policy instruments
How to Apply
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