India’s Approach to Triangular Climate Cooperation

Executive Summary

Addressing the challenge of climate change demands global collective action. An emphasis on traditional North-South paradigms of resource transfer may be one of the reasons for insufficient pace and scale of mitigation and adaptation efforts. This is largely due to inadequate financing and technological barriers within an evolving geopolitical landscape. Consequently, alternative paradigms like triangular cooperation, which emphasise improved even burden-sharing and transfer of appropriate policy and technology solutions, are worth exploring.

While India has engaged in one-off, fragmented triangular projects since the 1950s, over the past decade the country has started to engage in longer-term agreements with partner countries and multilateral institutions. These agreements tend to highlight climate resilience and energy transitions as a key focus sector. It is important to analyse whether these agreements are political wish-lists, or if they can actually result in meaningful collaboration. This paper calls for an exploration of the role that triangular cooperation plays in India’s climate diplomacy. It analyses the advantages and challenges of this model, examines India’s experience and capabilities, and proposes a research agenda to inform policy decisions and unlock opportunities for triangular climate cooperation.

The Potential of Triangular Cooperation

Triangular cooperation offers a promising alternative for climate action by:

• Leveraging Strengths: It combines the technical expertise and financial know-how of Northern partners with the context-specific knowledge and experience of pivotal countries like India. This allows for more effective knowledge transfer and capacity building.
• Building Partnerships and Networks: It fosters collaboration amongst partners across regions, who may not have traditionally engaged with each other. This enables countries with shared challenges and developmental contexts to learn from each other and build lasting partnerships for climate action.
• Institutional Benefits and Low Costs of Implementation: It promotes flexibility and innovation, moving away from rigid donor-recipient models and facilitating the co-creation of tailored solutions. It also allows for the implementation of appropriate solutions, while using established institutional channels of donor partners. The comparatively lower costs of technology procurement and human resources from countries in the Global South can lead to increased efficiency of development finance compared to direct implementation by industrialised countries.

India’s Potential as a Pivotal Partner

India has valuable experience in addressing climate change within the Global South context of economic growth and sustainable development. It has pioneered appropriate, successful domestic policies, financing technology solutions in areas like renewable energy, climate-smart agriculture, and disaster risk reduction at scale. The country’s rising economic and geopolitical influence, coupled with its commitment to SouthSouth cooperation, positions it as a credible partner for driving climate action in the Global South.

To fully realise India’s potential in triangular climate cooperation, several key research areas need to be addressed:

• Triangular Cooperation Within India’s Climate Diplomacy: Amongst different venues available for India to engage in climate diplomacy, analysis on how triangular cooperation fits into the broader climate strategy and its place amongst other forms of diplomacy is required. The partners that India chooses to engage with, institutional channels, and the choices of technology shared amongst countries are important insights to understand the role that triangular cooperation can play for India to meet its aspirations to be a global climate leader. It is important to understand whether India is passive in such agreements, merely facilitating the agenda of donor countries, or whether India actively shapes the climate agenda, bringing to the table financial and technical norms, standards, and resources? If so, it is important to study what factors drive India to navigate triangular arrangements, and what its interests are. It is also important to evaluate the extent to which these agreements have been implemented and their impact and effectiveness.
• Exploring Channels of Engagement: India engages in triangular cooperation through various channels. The first is by expanding engagement with industrialised countries that India has strong bilateral relationships with by adding a recipient partner. Second, India works as a partner with multilateral agencies such as the UN to build specific funds and programmes for projects in third countries. Lastly, the most innovative option has been for the country to spearhead global triangular platforms such as the International Solar Alliance and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. If India is to expand its ambitions for global climate cooperation, it becomes important to understand how and why India engages in triangular cooperation via these different institutional mechanisms across geographies and sectors. The merit of different institutional mechanisms, their usefulness, and policy recommendations to strengthen these channels can provide domestic as well as international stakeholders with important insights to increase the success of new triangular modalities, while reducing fragmentation, poor monitoring, and evaluation.
• Balancing Horizontality and Formalisation: India, along with its partner countries, would benefit from creating guidelines, norms, and structured mechanisms around triangular cooperation to ensure the elimination of hurdles in financing and institutional channels. The challenges include creating common procedures for fund disbursement, decisions on which institutions will oversee project selection and implementation, and rules for project monitoring and evaluation. At the same time, triangular cooperation is unique in that it should allow all partner countries to manoeuvre flexibly, presenting diverse perspectives toward a common goal of coordination. This flexibility is meant to provide space to move away from hierarchical donor-recipient modalities. Lastly, to optimise triangular arrangements, the approach will ideally go beyond government engagement. Therefore, questions arise on how India will formalise its engagements while maintaining space for all partners to meet their needs. Further, the increasing role of the private sector, sub-national governments and non-government organisations will have to be explored.

Triangular cooperation holds significant promise as a mechanism for accelerating climate action in the Global South. India, with its experience, expertise, and growing global stature, is uniquely positioned to be a leading force in this endeavour. This paper argues for more empirical studies to guide the creation of effective policy and build stronger domestic capacity to engage in alternate paradigms of development in emerging economies like India. By addressing the key research questions outlined in this paper and implementing the policy recommendations, India can unlock the full potential of triangular climate cooperation, solidify its role as a global climate leader, and contribute meaningfully to a more sustainable future for all. This discussion paper raises these questions to contribute to the evidence on improving global cooperation around climate change and to showcase how newer models of cooperation need to be better understood with evidence from developing countries.