It is a shared understanding within the CIF that the challenges of climate change need to be addressed by all those affected by them. For this reason, stakeholder engagement is one of the fundamental principles of the CIF. The CIF is committed to providing guidance to member countries and other involved actors on how to build up and strengthen their stakeholder engagement strategies. With this in mind, the objective of the following guidance note is to provide a practical resource for the governments and their partners developing investment plans in identifying and analyzing the stakeholder base that will be impacted by or that may have an interest in an investment plan. The timeliness and robustness of stakeholder mapping has a major bearing on the success of the entire process of stakeholder engagement, which is key to promoting local ownership of the investment plan. The ownership is critical for subsequent successful implementation, as stressed by the CIF governance and programming documents.
In 2015, the CIF welcomed 10 new countries to the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) and 15 to the Forest Investment Program (FIP)—from a pool of over 70 applicants—to expand the CIF’s reach to 72 countries. As new countries join and ready themselves for the development of investment plans, the CIF has also seen other countries experiencing delays in endorsing their plans, and countries embarking on the task of monitoring and reporting of how investment plans delivered on their objectives. Within this context, stakeholder mapping is very likely to gain in importance, so this reference material comes even timelier.
The note opens with a brief introduction to the CIF and how it operates to achieve its goals, proceeds to a conceptual discussion of stakeholder engagement, then applied practically to the objectives of the CIF. Following that some basic concepts around stakeholder mapping are explained and a business case for mapping is presented, closing up with a step-by-step stakeholder mapping guidance.