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. The discussion will also incorporate perspectives from NGOs and practitioners on civil society and community participation in national climate planning. 

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. 

A livestream will also become available via Microsoft Teams

About the speakers

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). 

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.