How can governments develop a whole-of-society approach to address the climate crisis

A “whole-of-society” approach is about getting all hands-on-deck. To adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change, governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are initiating policy actions to focus on water management, renewable energy, and sustainable development initiatives. At the same time, to foster more coherent, impactful and people-centered approaches this multi-faceted issue,—the MENA region urgently needs to make climate everyone’s business.  Whole-of-society goes beyond action by governments and private sector firms to also include all parts and possibilities of civil society. One can visualize this as a set of expanding concentric circles of individual and collective actors—all taking action in their everyday lives and functions.

Indeed, at COP26 in 2021, the IPCC Glasgow Climate Pact, emphasized that achieving climate targets means developing a “whole-of-society” approach that rallies all government, private and civil society actors and resources in the global climate response. The World Bank has tackled this issue by defining and organising all those actions that are needed by individuals, communities and civil society. The Bank’s whole-of-society framework groups these varied initiatives around three types of action. The first set of actions focus on promoting ‘collaboration’ by encouraging MENA governments to get national and local civil society actors such as academics, farmers associations, think tanks, all engaged in climate policymaking, planning and monitoring. Such processes could include citizen climate assemblies and youth councils supporting the formulation of NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) which are well established elsewhere. 

The second set of actions emphasize ‘independent actions’ whereby governments seek to empower self-motivated individuals, communities and local organizations to do more and better. Such actions could include building awareness and knowledge, establishing community-led early warning systems and local adaptations to floods and droughts, incubating green social enterprises that innovate to meet changing energy, water and agriculture futures, or whole societies changing behaviors and shifting lifestyle practices to secure their access to safe water and sustainable energy.  

The third set of actions on ‘accountability’ concern the development of a climate-accountable environment in which the capability of academia, thinktanks, the media and field-based NGOs, is harnessed to hold governments, private firms, and global institutions to account for climate commitments, financing and investments. For instance, many CSOs have taken huge steps in building databases that track and publicize climate progress at the country level, while others work locally to improve climate data collection and information accessibility.

In Iraq, for example, the whole-of-society efforts of the Ministry of Environment prioritized knowledge building and behaviour change among youth, agricultural workers, and local government officials. They have also recognized the need for a whole-of-society alliance, and seek to reinforce the government’s commitment to locally-led adaptation and mitigation. 

In Nepal, a collection of efforts have been launched to get all members of society on board with government climate action.  Nationally, following the government’s climate budget tagging, a Citizen’s Climate Budget aimed to increase public awareness on government climate spending. The Bank and other donors have also supported the development of a National Framework of Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA)—a community-led, multistakeholder climate adaptation planning and local budgeting process that assists local governments engage with communities in co-created climate action.  

In Kenya, World Bank support for the Financing Locally-Led Climate Action Project not only facilitates local adaptation planning but helps to create a model to channel more funding to local governments and communities to fund priority investments—making locally-relevant adaptation action a reality. The project also embraces the whole-of-society approach by ensuring collaborative government and community decision-making, by focusing on vulnerable groups, and taking localized approaches to the national scale.

Understanding the various aspects of a whole-of-society approach to climate action is helpful to governments in that it brings under one umbrella the range of people-centred and governance-focused initiatives that get lost among competing priorities—such as green accountability, locally-led adaptation, just transition and behavioral change programs. 

There is no doubt that more understanding and more action by more actors will reinforce, strengthen and speed-up government’s path to net zero and climate resilience.  In their efforts to identify exactly what this shift entails governments in MENA can adopt these three streams of action. 

Years have passed since the concept of whole-of-society first emerged. It is time that we moved forward more decisively and in a more comprehensive and structured way to make it happen—the rapid transformation needed to reach 2030 targets is too great and it is counter intuitive to all our climate efforts, to leave a vast set of actors out of the climate puzzle.