CPEIR – Climate Public Expenditure and Institutional Review – is a tool to review and assess various aspects of climate change related public expenditures and the institutional framework of the public agencies, as well as other actors (e.g. development partners and CSOs) involved in the climate change finance. CPEIR was first introduced in Nepal in 2011 with support from UNDP. The process was then rolled-out in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and then Africa and Latina America. As of the June 2015, there were 19 countries in Asia, 9 countries in Africa and 6 countries in Latin America who conducted any form of CPEIRs. Other development partners (e.g. the World Bank) also supported these initiatives. In most of the countries CPEIR was done at the level of state/federal budget while few countries also have conducted CPEIR exercise at the sub-national level (e.g. Pakistan).
CPEIR countries, as of June 2015.
CPEIR methodology is generally based on the World Bank’s Public Expenditures Review exercise. However, unlike the PERs, the CPEIR process has a distinct characteristics of analyzing also the institutional framework of climate change public finance. This add-on to the standard PER process is due to the cross-cutting nature of climate change related finances which requires an additional assessment of the institutional framework for a topic that is cross-sector. The cross-cutting nature of the climate change finance also has a significant impact on the process of the review. Unlike the typical PERs where the data on public expenditures is generally available and relatively low efforts are required to obtain the required general financial data on planned and actual government budget expenditures, the climate change expenditures are not explicitly recorded by the government statistics systems (such as the GFS classifications). Therefore, unlike PERs with most of the efforts put on analyzing the effectiveness and efficiency of public expenditures, CPEIR processes spend most of the efforts on gathering and triangulation of the financial data on climate change expenditures. This additional step that requires tremendous efforts and resources adds an invaluable importance to CPEIRs – basically, CPEIRs provide information that governments do not possess themselves, despite the fact that CPEIRs mostly use the raw government data on budgets.
Despite its significant added value to the knowledge on climate change related expenditures, the data gathering challenge also brings additional disadvantage as CPEIRs pay less attention to the effectiveness and efficiency of the public expenditures compared to the PERs. This is not an embedded characteristics of CPEIRs but an evolutionary/transitional challenge of CPEIRs which may positively change over time.
The most reliable and systematic information on CPEIRs is collected by UNDP Asia-Pacific Regional Centre (UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub) and published online. The database on CPEIRs is also available online.
UNDP also conducted a review of the CPEIR process lessons learnt in November 2012. The review is also available onlnie.