Theory of Change

When launched in 2012, the Mitigation Action Facility, formerly known as the NAMA Facility, was instrumental in establishing the concept of ‘transformational change’. The concept has gained further momentum with the operationalisation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and is equally applied in the Paris Agreement. The Mitigation Action Facility continues its focus on catalysing transformational change towards sustainable carbon-neutral development, supporting the Paris Agreement’s objective to limit the increase in global average temperature ‘to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels’. 

The Mitigation Action Facility emphasises how a mix of different types of interventions – in particular, regulatory and financial ones – may trigger behaviour, consumption and production methods in developing countries that are conducive to carbon-neutral development. Mitigation Action Facility support enables public and private actors in developing countries and emerging economies to address financial barriers to behaviour change, consumption and production patterns, and the use of carbon-neutral technologies. The project portfolio demonstrates that across the various sectors, carbon-neutral technologies can become economically viable and thus encourage and facilitate further investments in broader mitigation measures within a sector.

The Theory of Change (ToC) seeks to illustrate the transformational potential by depicting the pathway of changes that shall be initiated through the Mitigation Action Facility support. These desired changes are primarily triggered by the individual projects. Projects shall demonstrate how climate finance will effectively contribute to a transformational change. Given the Mitigation Action Facility’s objective of supporting implementation of ambitious mitigation measures to drive decarbonisation in priority sectors, the focus of projects is on financial support mechanisms that serve to mobilise capital investments in and operation of carbon-neutral alternatives. Technical support and institutional and regulatory capacity development in partner countries may be provided during project implementation to facilitate this objective. The underlying assumptions behind the ToC can be found in the supporting narrative document. The ToC is divided into impact, outcome, outputs, activities and inputs, as shown below: