Multilateral and bilateral intermediaries are a crucial part of the climate finance landscape. Of the approximately USD 97 billion that constitutes current global climate finance flows, intermediaries distribute more than one third. Against the backdrop of ambitious climate financing goals, fiscal austerity has put public budgets under growing strain and the pressure is on to ensure that every dollar of public money invested is spent wisely. Growing demand for transparent and coherent approaches to measure, monitor and evaluate the results of international climate spending is driving work to improve the tools, frameworks and methods in place to assess the effectiveness of climate finance. In general, intermediaries are working hard to improve their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems.  However there is significant room for improvement, particularly to ensure that M&E is applied across the full lifecycle of projects and programs, and that results are shared inform our collective understanding of what is working, what is not working, and why.

This paper examines the M&E systems applied by a selection of eight multilateral and bilateral intermediaries, as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reporting framework. It was originally developed as a background paper for ‘Improving the Effectiveness of Climate Finance: Key Lessons’, a joint study by a consortium of researchers from Environmental Defense Fund, Climate Policy Initiative, Brookings Institution, and Overseas Development Institute on the topic of the effectiveness of climate finance published in November 2011.