• Coordinated intergovernmental action to address climate change has grown substantially in recent years across a variety of sectors. This is especially visible through the launch of new initiatives during UN climate conferences.
  • Cooperation amongst governments is essential to meet climate mitigation and adaptation goals. However, the absence of formalized transparency and accountability mechanisms for assessing these initiatives has raised concerns about their impact and effectiveness.
  • Existing assessment frameworks focus on particular aspects of these initiatives, such as institutional structure or outputs generated, but these tools have limitations. They focus largely on multi-stakeholder or non-state-actor-led initiatives and do not account for an initiative’s evolution over time.
  • This paper proposes an expectations framework to assess whether cooperative initiatives are meeting expectations across three stages: from initial pledges to emerging efforts and, ultimately, to established initiatives delivering impact.
  • The framework identifies four vital elements: complementarity to the broader climate cooperation landscape, robust governance structures, implementation and delivery in line with objectives, and transparency through monitoring and reporting mechanisms.