The potential of GPI for Côte d’Ivoire and other West African countries
Climate finance is one of the areas of international cooperation where the new concept of Global Public Investment (GPI) can play a critical role by switching the top-down approach of donors and international financial structures. West African countries, as well as other recipients of international public climate finance, are critical of and frustrated by the procedures and structures through which they strive to access climate finance. Indeed, the architecture of international public finance maintains a structural imbalance between influential donors and low-income recipient countries. Recipient countries often have no decision-making power about the priorities, procedures, financing amount, granting process, and implementation of climate finance.
Climate finance tends to be perceived as a mater of charity rather than moral responsibility from the perspective of bilateral and multilateral climate finance providers. However, when it comes to a global issue such as climate change, all are responsible, even though not at the same level. Because the environment is a global public good, the impacts of global warming on the environment therefore constitute a global problem. The resolution or mitigation of this problem requires global coordination beyond the individual borders of each country.
This is why all countries must contribute to the extent of their abilities to resolve global problems such as climate change. No country is too poor to contribute to resolving these global problems. Likewise, no rich country can be satisfied with its surplus as a contribution to resolving these global problems.
From such a perspective, the concept of GPI, which stipulates that all contribute, all participate in decision-making, and all benefit from collective effort, is an essential innovation in global public finance. The GPI concept is not yet operationalized on a large scale and will still have to convince its skeptics of the need for a paradigm shift in global public finances.
This is why this study strives to contribute to popularizing this concept of GPI. To achieve this goal, the first part of the article assesses the architecture and current practice of climate finance. The second part demonstrates how the new GPI paradigm is a relevant and effective alternative to solving global problems such as climate change. The third part proposes a strategy to hasten the acceptance and implementation of the GPI concept in African countries and across the world. It suggests freeing GPI from the very specific and technical discourse of the field of finance, and instead developing a discourse that is more accessible to the public and which relies on existing concepts of interdependence, global citizenship, and eco-citizenship. The paper's conclusion shows how the concept of GPI is a logical continuation of adaptation to the reality of today's increasingly globalized world. The article ends with practical recommendations that West African countries could implement to effectively contribute to operationalizing the GPI concept internationally
