Climate action is crucial for the African continent due to its vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change. The effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and droughts, disproportionately affect the African population, especially the rural poor who rely on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. Moreover, climate change exacerbates existing challenges such as poverty, food insecurity, and water scarcity, which are already prevalent in many African countries. Therefore, climate action is essential to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Climate action can take various forms, such as adopting renewable energy, sustainable land use practices, reforestation etc. We seek to look into carbon pricing policies on the one hand and climate finance on the other. Carbon pricing is a policy tool that puts a price on carbon emissions to discourage their release into the atmosphere. In the form of a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme, they make carbon emissions more expensive and incentivize the adoption of low-carbon technologies. Climate finance refers to the financial resources that are provided by high income countries, international organizations, and the private sector to support low income countries in mitigating and adapting to climate change.
First, Resilient40 seeks to examine the emergence of carbon pricing policies in African countries. In the last two decades, countries all over the world have implemented carbon pricing policies as part of their fight against climate change. In Africa, however, no such policy was adopted until South Africa started taxing greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 and recently (2024) in Kenya. More recently though, an increasing number of African countries have decided to design carbon pricing policies. Be it a carbon tax or an emission trading scheme, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco, Malawi, Botswana, and Gabon are designing their carbon pricing policy at the moment.
Research has shown that in the agenda-setting phase as well as the policy design phase, external (f)actors have been involved. In fact, as of 2010, the decision of nations to pursue a carbon pricing policy was mainly the result of international factors such as climate commitments and external influence. Next, in the policy design phase, external actors, like multilateral organizations or development agencies, are often involved by offering technical support or capacity development activities. Through these kinds of supporting activities, they can play an important role in the policy-making process by accelerating or delaying policy change. Against this background, the following question arises: which actors are engaged in the carbon pricing policy-making process, how and why do they get involved? We aim to look at the domestic, regional, and international actors that are active in the field of carbon pricing in the abovementioned countries, uncover the nature of their activities, and explain their motivations to act this way. By doing so, this contributes to the understanding of climate policy-making in African countries and the role of external involvement.
Second, we seek to investigate African policymakers’ perceptions about climate finance donors. Over the years, there have been promises of financial support that were not fulfilled, resulting in a breach of trust between high-income and low-income nations. In this context, this looks into the perceptions of African policymakers of climate finance donors. The analysis includes several kinds of donors: individual countries as well as multilateral banks and United Nations climate funds. Studying perceptions gives insights on the effectiveness of the donors. As climate finance is crucial to facilitate climate action in African nations, it is worth exploring whether the recipients perceive the donors to be effective.
