Are international climate aid really climate-related? Extent and determinants of donor countries miscoding of climate projects[L'aide internationale en faveur du climat est-elle réellement liée au climat ? Ampleur et déterminants des erreurs de codification des projets climatiques par les pays donateurs]

Contrary to donor countries self-declarations, actual assistance received for climate change mitigation and adaptation is deemed incomplete by recipient countries. The existing literature indicates that donor countries overestimate the climate change content of their international aid projects. In this article, we consider new data corresponding to international climate projects funded by donor countries between 2002 and 2018 using the project-level database from the OECD-DAC Creditor Reporting System. First, we assess the share of projects wrongly reported as climate-relevant in a systematic way through a textual analysis with Python programming and complementary hand-coding. We find that out of the 63, 195 projects reported as climate-relevant by donor countries, nearly half (48.6%) were not climate-related. Furthermore, we find that 67.8% of adaptation projects and 64.3% of mitigation projects were miscoded. Second, using country-level data for 28 donor countries from 2002 to 2018, we estimate the factors that may affect the miscoding of climate projects. Our econometric results show that economic, environmental, and political factors have an influence upon the donor's miscoding. Adding to the results of the literature, we find that the political-economy argument stating that miscoding could be an electoral strategy for donor governments is only valid for less wealthy donor countries.