My current project seeks to understand why some tropical state and provincial governments secure international forest funding more often and at larger scales than others. Together with my colleagues from the GCF Task Force, I'm using a mixed-methods study design, combining a global scan of post-2005 funding flows above US$1M to the tropics with insights from ~20 interviews with climate funding experts. Our goal is to identify the conditions that enable subnational actors to access funding and provide practical steps that donors and subnational governments can take to make forest finance more accessible.
What we’re doing. We assembled a dataset of post-2005 funding “incidents” exceeding US$1 million in tropical forest regions and classified them by degrees of government-involvement: subnational (funds flow directly to a first-order subnational government), hybrid (subnationals are formal co-implementers but not direct recipients), and national. We then used within-country propensity matching to build comparable treatment (funded) and control (unfunded) sets of jurisdictions, and ran an ATT-weighted logistic regression to identify how conditions like deforestation rates, HDI, and GCF Task Force membership correlate with access to international forest funding. In parallel, we’re conducting ~20 semi-structured interviews with funding experts to surface the 'intangible' barriers and enabling conditions, and reality-check the results from the regression analysis.
What this could change. By combining quantitative patterns with funder perspectives, the project aims to surface actionable levers for donors, intermediaries, and subnational governments: clearer direct-access windows for states and provinces, fit-for-purpose instruments (when grants, results-based payments, or blended finance make sense—and when debt does not), and targeted capacity investments that help jurisdictions meet access requirements. Understanding the conditions that enable access to funding, will allow governments to take steps towards creating these conditions, and donors to reduce the barriers to accessing their funds.