On Thursday 24 September, ClimateFiGS will host a lunchtime session with Ruth Carlitz, Paula Haerle and Duncan Pruett on how well climate finance and Nationally Determined Contributions reflect the priorities of the people they are meant to serve.
Date: 24 September 2026
Time: 12:00-13:30
Location: REC - B1.02 (additional live stream via Microsoft Teams)
Nationally Determined Contributions are the main documents through which countries state their climate priorities and priorities for international support. Yet an NDC's national origin says little about whose priorities shape its content. This session asks how closely national climate plans reflect citizen priorities, how those priorities relate to climate finance, and what meaningful participation looks like in practice.
Ruth Carlitz will present the findings of her research with the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) on whether mitigation finance aligns with the sectoral priorities recipient countries set out in their NDCs. Paula Haerle will connect these findings to her 2026 master's thesis, which compares citizen climate priorities from the People's Climate Vote 2021 with the content of 13 G20 countries' NDCs. Duncan Pruett closes with case examples from research on civil society and community participation in NDC processes, showing what happens when the people NDCs are meant to represent are, or are not, part of drafting them.
The session will close with an open discussion of what 'nationally determined' means in practice and what more meaningful alignment between climate plans, finance, and public priorities would require ahead of COP31.
About Ruth Carlitz
Ruth Carlitz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she is part of the Political Economy and Transnational Governance programme group, and Principal Investigator of ClimateFiGS (funded by an ERC Starting Grant, 2024–2029). Her research focuses on the politics of public goods provision in low-income countries, from the perspectives of both governments and citizens, with particular regional expertise in East Africa. She holds a PhD in Political Science from UCLA and previously held positions at Tulane University and the University of Gothenburg. Her presentation draws on joint research with Thomas Wencker (DEval), "Targets without Traction? Do Nationally Determined Contributions Fail to Drive Mitigation Funding Distribution?" (DEval Policy Brief 4/2024).
About PAULA HAERLE
Paula Haerle holds an MSc in Comparative Politics and an MSc in International Development from the University of Amsterdam and works as a Junior Researcher on the ClimateFiGS project. Her master's thesis, "Nationally Determined, Publicly Aligned? Citizen Climate Policy Priorities and Sectoral Priority Congruence in G20 NDCs," was supervised within ClimateFiGS and uses model-assisted content analysis to compare citizen climate priorities with NDC text across 13 G20 countries.
About Duncan Pruett
Duncan Pruett is Executive Director of Recourse, an organisation that holds public finance institutions accountable for their policies and investments on climate and development. He joined Recourse in 2024 after nearly two decades at Oxfam, where he led programmes across Asia focused on trade, agriculture, land rights, and climate and economic justice. He is co-author, alongside Christina Hill, of "Climate Plans for the People: Civil Society and Community Participation in National Action Plans on Climate Change" (Oxfam Novib, March 2024).