This article presents learning from the Establishment Phase and illustrates the challenges LIFE-AR’s approach to governance faced, together with the adaptive solutions that were crafted in the face of capacity, institutional and political constraints.
From Principle to Practice: LIFE-AR's Vision for Inclusive Climate Governance
In LIFE-AR, governance is rooted in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) 2050 Vision and in the principle of Leave no country and no one behind, which underpins the partnership compact. Governance in LIFE-AR is concerned with who is represented in climate decision-making, whose knowledge and priorities shape those decisions, and how the interests of disadvantaged groups are protected.
At the international level, this means addressing long-standing imbalances in global climate finance and decision-making, where LDCs have often had limited influence. At the national level, it means embedding gender equality and social justice within system design, including the meaningful participation of women, marginalised groups and civil society in shaping climate finance mechanisms. At the local level, it is about ensuring that decision-making processes recognise differentiated climate risks and vulnerabilities, and that the interests of those most exposed are centred, not only 'taken into account'.
Across all three levels, governance in LIFE-AR is treated as an integral feature of how climate finance systems are conceived and shaped.
The Governance Offer
We will create more inclusive governance of climate decisions that are centred on gender transformation and social justice
Building the Foundation: Why Getting Governance Right Comes First
Translating these principles into practice required deliberate investment in governance systems before investments began to flow. LIFE-AR focuses on enabling LDCs to lead their own resilient futures through country-led arrangements designed to tailor national priorities to local realities, support climate risk financing at the lowest appropriate level. LIFE AR facilitates inclusive, gender responsive, and evidence-based approaches that move LDCs beyond reactive crisis response to proactive and long-term climate risk governance. This is supported through peer learning, and building long term partnerships with local actors including civil society organisations, academia and private sector among others.
During the Establishment Phase, LIFE-AR countries strengthened existing structures and set up new ones where needed, building on current government systems. The national platforms focus on climate finance mobilisation and provide oversight, increasing transparency and accountability, ensuring quality assurance of investments at national level. This deliberate process of investing governance in the long-term counter development practice, which often prioritises rapid implementation.
Social inclusion is central to LIFE-AR’s approach as a defining feature of how decisions are made. LIFE-AR ensures that decisions on financing and investments include voices likely to be left behind, recognising that social inclusion is a cross-cutting priority in climate action that must be built into governance structures from the outset. This reflects a broader understanding that governance arrangements are central to effective climate adaptation, determining how collective goals are pursued, who bears responsibility for action, and how coordination across institutional boundaries, scales and sectors is achieved. Without deliberate attention, adaptation efforts risk remaining fragmented, inequitable, and insufficient.
Establishment phase: Designing systems before investments
The Establishment Phase is a distinctive and innovative feature of LIFE-AR. For Front Runner Countries, it took from two to three years to design the systems through which climate finance will later flow. This includes the institutional arrangements, decision-making processes and financial architecture needed to support locally led adaptation at scale. LIFE-AR countries set up national platforms rooted in their own institutions and practices.
This matters because it shifts attention towards how decisions about the system itself are made. During the Establishment Phase, inclusive governance is visible in the composition and functioning of the bodies responsible for designing the processes, and in the features that are being built into the delivery mechanisms they create.
This distinction is important. The subsequent Test & Evolve Phase will pilot these systems, test whether they function as intended, and check that the final investments meet the needs of the most vulnerable. The Establishment Phase, by contrast, is concerned with whether the foundations are being laid for inclusive decision-making in the first place. It is here that LIFE-AR seeks to ensure that governance arrangements are fit for purpose before they are put into practice.
Where Ambition Meets Reality: Governance Lessons from the Ground
International level: shaping the system
At the LDC Group platform level, governance of LIFE-AR is anchored in a distinctive partnership architecture. At its centre sits the LIFE-AR Board, supported by a wider ecosystem of structures including the Secretariat, technical advisory groups, LDC advisors and on demand consultants.
The LIFE-AR Board brings LDC representatives (typically senior permanent secretaries) and international partners together as joint members of a common platform designed to advance LDC priorities.
During the Establishment Phase, conscious experimentation and iterative operational learning were required to make this novel architecture function effectively across its diverse roles, ensuring mutual accountability, enabling technical problem-solving, providing political legitimacy and setting strategic direction. Over time, the Board and its supporting structures demonstrated flexibility and adaptive management, refining working modalities to strengthen LDC engagement while navigating the complex realities of governing a business-unusual, multi-country initiative (see Box 1)
Box 1 - International-level governance learning from the LIFE-AR Board
LDC membership of the LIFE-AR Board was designed to maximise representativeness and inclusion. Regional representation across Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa and Asia-Pacific was prioritised, and the inclusion of the LDC Group Chair ensured the initiative remained anchored in the LDC Vision. French–English simultaneous interpretation proved essential in enabling engagement by Francophone LDCs and in strengthening shared ownership across the platform.
As the Establishment Phase progressed, the Board’s primary role centred on political legitimacy, strategic direction and collective decision-making at key moments, while more detailed technical work increasingly shifted to thematic working groups and Secretariat-led processes. This differentiation enabled the Secretariat to undertake sustained technical negotiation with donors, while maintaining LDC political anchoring and oversight through the Board.
The effectiveness of this architecture is reflected in several areas. Most notably, the substantial technical effort that produced the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for a future independent LDC facility helped reconfigure working relationships between donors and LDCs. The Board has also demonstrated the capacity to respond decisively to rapidly shifting international political and funding contexts. Together, these developments show how representation, deliberate inclusion, role clarity and adaptive management combined to strengthen LDC leadership within a novel governance model.
National-level governance learning: operationalising an ambitious Governance Offer
LDCs commit to creating more inclusive governance of climate decisions centred on gender transformation and social justice. This means strengthening multi-level, multi-stakeholder platforms; ensuring meaningful participation of women, youth, indigenous peoples and other excluded groups in planning and decision-making; and improving transparency and accountability in climate finance, results, learning and information sharing. Early experience during the Establishment Phase, however, showed that the practical implications of embedding inclusive governance in system design at national level and local levels were less understood. In many cases, legislative and institutional frameworks for gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) existed but capacity and implementation gaps prevented their being addressed systematically in the design of delivery mechanisms or in emerging monitoring and evaluation (MEL) frameworks.
Box 2 - Challenges with Representation
Representation is a key indicator of social inclusion and has been foregrounded and tracked since LIFE-AR began. Across the initiative, efforts were made to ensure gender balance and broad representation across all decision-making structures and key roles.
At the level of national focal points, this resulted in an even balance between women and men, demonstrating that inclusive leadership at senior levels was both possible and effective. However, in many countries achieving gender balance within national task teams proved challenging, particularly where line ministries had few women in senior or technical roles to nominate. These dynamics confirmed long-standing patterns of structural exclusion within public institutions, which LIFE-AR can surface, but cannot immediately overcome by itself.
In response, the Secretariat initially took a more proactive role in advancing governance and GESI. This included commissioning situational analyses to map existing institutional arrangements and legal frameworks related to social inclusion, analysing gender representation within LIFE-AR structures, and creating spaces for collective reflection through peer learning. These efforts were largely framed through MEL design processes, reflecting an early focus on establishing baselines, tracking progress, and demonstrating alignment with the Governance Offer.
The subsequent decision to establish GESI national focal points and a platform-level GESI working group formed part of this learning trajectory. These mechanisms are intended to provide institutional anchoring for governance and inclusion within national LIFE-AR processes, helping to ensure that GESI considerations are at the centre of system design. At the same time, experience increasingly suggested that while such anchoring was necessary, it was unlikely on its own to deliver a more transformational interpretation of inclusive governance (see Box 3).
Box 3 - Limits to role-based approaches: GESI focal points
During the Establishment Phase GESI focal points often operated with limited time and resources, and without formal decision-making authority within their wider task teams. As a result, their ability to influence system design depended heavily on the extent to which national focal points and other senior actors prioritised governance and inclusion. Where such backing existed, GESI focal points were able to contribute more substantively; where it did not, their role was more constrained.
This informed the decision to invest in dedicated social inclusion capacity within the Secretariat, reflecting the understanding that shifting power in practice required sustained capability building, awareness raising and political engagement.
Surfacing Constraints, Building Foundations: What the Establishment Phase Taught Us
Learnings from the Establishment Phase suggest that embedding inclusive governance within climate finance systems is challenging and requires sustained attention, iteration and adjustment. Progress was shaped by gradual innovation, evolving strategic planning and pragmatism.
Capacity constraints, together with the need to build buy-in and a shared understanding of the transformational intent of the Governance Offer, meant that early approaches at national level focused primarily on representation, coordination and compliance.
LIFE-AR moved from an initial focus on carrying existing governance and GESI commitments into new systems towards a deeper interrogation of who gets to decide, and how, within the delivery mechanisms being designed.
This reframing reflects the purpose of the Establishment Phase: to surface constraints, build foundations, and clarify what more transformative governance will require as systems move into testing and evolution.
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