Introducing the “What Works in Climate Policy” Project: Catalyzing Green Budgeting in Catalonia

Catalonia, in order to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation challenges, apart from prioritizing relevant direct policy measures, is also developing an ambitious and holistic green budgeting reform, which covers the whole budget cycle and components, including revenue and expenditure tagging, budget requests climate appraisal, climate fiscal risks identification and management, climate-focused policy evaluations and generating evidence for better policies in the climate and environmental area.

Precisely, in regard to generating policy evidence, the Catalan government and the Catalan Institute for Public Policy Evaluation (Ivàlua) are jointly launching the “”What Works in Climate Policy””. This initiative aims to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and policy formulation, so that evidence use, and policy evaluations are systematically incorporated in climate policy-design processes, and therefore, favoring greater policy effectiveness in such policies. The main expected outputs of this project are concise and accessible evidence review reports, and complementary events and workshops to disseminate the obtained evidence.

The initiative is ambitious in the way it intends to actively engage key stakeholders within Catalonia’s climate policy ecosystem at every stage of the evidence synthesis and dissemination process. First, through a project taskforce that comprises the Directorate-General of Budget, the Department of Climate Action and Ivàlua. Then, university experts are entrusted with the synthesis of evidence, focusing on the effectiveness of diverse policy tools in achieving specific climate objectives. Additionally, a select group of local experts from Catalan public administration, non-governmental organizations, and academia will contribute with valuable insights throughout the entire process. Finally, to enhance practical implementation, targeted workshops will be organized for professionals from units with competencies in the subject matter of each evidence review to incentivize the actual utilization of synthesized evidence to inform and shape climate policy decisions.