Clare Shakya

Director, Climate Change

Clare is the director of IIED’s Climate Change research group. She has over 25 years of experience in development, in climate, energy and natural resources. Previously she spent 15 years with DFID, leading the integration of climate change thinking and finance into DFID's development interventions in Asia and Africa Divisions. She is interested in politically astute, agile processes that learn iteratively about how to support a just transformation to a climate positive future.

Full biography

Clare is responsible for the oversight of the propositional research of IIED’s Climate Change research group into climate action that is far-reaching, far-sighted and socially just. She works with the group on: getting climate finance to where it matters most, to the local level in support poor people’s priorities for climate positive action; on the governance of risk and mechanisms to tackle the compounding risk for the poorest; and on building southern capabilities to end the culture of fly in fly out technical assistance.

She supports the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group develop the LDC initiative for effective adaptation – exploring how to develop institutional mechanisms that can support resilient development at country scale. She supports the LDC initiative to leapfrog to a modern distributed smart grid.

Expertise

Equitable transitions to climate resilient and low emission development pathways, which empower the poor; managing risk and uncertainty through flexible, adaptive and politically astute approaches to development; processes for strategic influencing through amplifying voice and real time learning into policy change; integration and blending of climate finance into development and humanitarian programming; natural resource governance, in particular water resources, land and forests; enabling the private sector to develop affordable energy services and resilient value chains; building southern capabilities to manage risk including parametric risk insurance and climate information services.

Before IIED

Senior climate change adviser at DFID, where I led climate change work for Africa Division and, earlier, for Asia Division. This included leading a review of climate work across the division and agreeing priorities, setting up facilities such as the Africa Risk Capacity and the South Asia Water Initiative and high level processes such as the Energy Africa campaign. Wider experience includes Commission For Africa, tackling the social impacts of AIDS, developing a toolkit for poverty and social impact analysis, community monitoring and setting up learning processes for sustainable livelihoods approaches.

Current work

Oversight of the Climate Change research group at IIED and exploring just transitions to low emission, climate resilient development pathways in fragile and stable contexts, and holistic risk management across development, humanitarian and climate silos.