Authors: Priscilla Negreiros, Jessie Press-Williams, Hamza Abdullah (CCFLA); Delfina Vildosola (SDSN Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance)

Filling the vast financing gap to meet the Paris Agreement goals requires significantly scaling up urban climate finance. This can help to harness cities’ great emissions reduction potential and build resilience to the increasing climate-related impacts they face.

Urban climate finance must grow by at least fivefold, to USD 4.3 trillion per year, for cities to meet their mitigation targets by 2030 (CCFLA 2024a). This demands rapid, coordinated action across all levels of government to align development and climate finance with national, regional, and local priorities. Funds must also be deployed strategically to maximize impact.

Country platforms are a key emerging mechanism for increasing climate and development finance. Led by national governments, these instruments can provide a powerful means of fostering collaboration among development partners around a shared strategic vision and priorities (Gilmour et al., 2024). Country platforms help to advance recipient nations’ transformational goals in priority areas—including climate finance—with international support to scale up investment. To realize country platforms’ full potential, national governments can opt to incorporate urban and subnational climate objectives in their design and priorities¹.

BARRIERS TO INTEGRATING URBAN CLIMATE CONSIDERATIONS INTO COUNTRY PLATFORMS

The same barriers that hinder the integration of subnational priorities into national climate strategies and plans can also sideline these perspectives in country platforms. These include misalignment with national political priorities, limited engagement channels, and capacity gaps. Many subnational governments in developing economies lack fiscal powers, access to finance, and technical capacity, curtailing their role in national development planning. Addressing these barriers, laid out in Table ES1, can enable more inclusive and effective national strategies and integrate urban climate concerns into country platforms.

Table ES1: Barriers to integrating urban climate priorities into country platforms

URBAN-INCLUSIVE COUNTRY PLATFORM FRAMEWORK

CCFLA’s vision for urban-inclusive country platforms is of nationally led platforms that have integrated subnational and urban climate agendas. Achieving this requires building a strong multi-stakeholder coordination mechanism that systematically integrates urban/subnational priorities into the design, governance, and implementation of climate and development strategies. This can ensure meaningful participation of subnational governments, alignment of local and national climate plans, and the mobilization of finance for urban mitigation, adaptation, and resilience projects. By embedding multilevel governance, sectoral coordination, and inclusive financing mechanisms, these platforms could enhance the effectiveness, equity, and scalability of country-driven climate action.

This paper presents a framework for urban-inclusive country platforms, aiming to support national governments in systematically integrating urban and subnational needs into the design, governance, financing, and implementation of country platforms.

This framework is particularly aimed at supporting national governments in countries characterized by rapid urbanization and the associated growth potential, along with climate and development challenges. It may be especially useful in contexts where urban centers are major sources of emissions and climate risks yet struggle with policy alignment and financial constraints and are often excluded from decision-making. In such settings, incorporating an urban and subnational perspective into country platforms can help to avoid emissions-intensive development pathways and build resilient communities and infrastructure.

The proposed framework includes a sequential roadmap moving from initial engagement to implementation to help national governments meaningfully engage subnational governments and urban priorities in decision-making, policy alignment, and resource allocation. The roadmap builds upon the five stages of Tanaka and Gilmour’s Country Platform Development Escalator (2025), adapting this tool to focus on the urban level, informed by G20 principles².

These stages are:

1. Initial Engagement: Establish whole-of-government ownership, engage urban ministries, and create inclusive coordination mechanisms such as national secretariats and urban taskforces.

2. Program Readiness: Align sectoral and cross-sectoral priorities across levels of government, including directly working on policy changes, and formally include subnational adaptation needs and just transition priorities in planning processes.

3. Investment Program: Support cities in developing Local Climate Action Plans (LCAPs) and project pipelines, provide tailored project preparation, and aggregate subnational investments to attract larger-scale financing.

4. Financing: Deploy concessional and innovative financial instruments targeting cities, leverage national and local financial intermediaries, and enable city-private sector engagement through technical assistance (TA) and matchmaking.

5. Implementation: Promote phased, adaptive delivery that includes city-level tracking, peer learning, civil society engagement, and coordinated delivery of TA and finance at the subnational level.

Each stage includes concrete operating features and indicators to guide platform developers and financiers in building inclusive, scalable, and results-oriented country platforms. The framework is not intended to be prescriptive but offers flexible entry points for countries at various stages of platform development. While these operating features are inherently cross-cutting, they have been aligned with the stage where their impact is most critical.

Table ES2: Framework for Urban-inclusive Country Platforms

1. Responsibilities for implementing and overseeing climate issues may vary, depending on countries’ political systems. We, therefore, use the term “subnational governments” to refer to political entities and “urban” to refer to the sectoral perspective.

2. These principles provide a non-binding framework to guide countries and development partners in designing and implementing country platforms that are country-owned, adapted to local contexts, and focused on sustainable development through inclusive collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement (G20 2020).