Explaining Ethiopia’s engagement in multilateral climate transparency arrangements: Why engage and with what implications for domestic climate action?

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), countries report on their climate actions through engaging in ever more elaborate transparency arrangements. There has been little analysis to date of whether and how developing countries, including Least Developed Countries, engage in these arrangements and how such engagement relates to domestic decision-making. In this article, we examine factors that hinder versus enable engagement in UNFCCC transparency arrangements in Ethiopia, drawing on interviews, document analysis and a stakeholder workshop. Our analysis highlights various factors that foster engagement, such as the desire to demonstrate climate leadership and the prospect of accessing finance, while technical and institutional constraints hinder engagement. Furthermore, although Ethiopia's engagement in UNFCCC transparency arrangements is growing, a direct link to domestic climate decision-making is not found. We conclude that engagement in UNFCCC transparency arrangements may normalize a mitigation-focused, market-oriented and monitoring-reliant approach to climate action in Ethiopia.