Ironically, one of the most useful things our capacity-building projects can do is plan for the day we’re no longer needed. That idea has shaped years of our partnership in Central Asia, building capacity in climate transparency across the region. And it’s worth spelling out because it runs counter to the grain of how technical assistance is often delivered.
Our philosophy is simple: leave the skills in the country. We want to leave the countries we train with the ability to do the work themselves. By passing on the knowledge, we’re offering support that leaves professionals with competence, institutional memory, and systems that run without us.
Capacity as the Deliverable
This conviction is the foundation of the Regional Climate Action Transparency Hub, or ReCATH, for Central Asia, and it’s helped guide the second phase of the project. With support from the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT), the GHGMI team worked with experts in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to strengthen national transparency systems and build a regional network of experts to carry the work forward.
Under the Paris Agreement, every country has to account for its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and show that the numbers hold up to scrutiny. But it’s not always common for a country to build these skills and expertise “in-house.” ReCATH, and our other ICAT-funded projects, were designed to overcome this issue. Hosted by the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC) and supported technically by our team and colleagues at CITEPA, the hub treated capacity itself as the deliverable.
Harnessing Peer Review
The clearest example of how this was accomplished is the peer review of national GHG inventories. The direct goal was to improve inventory quality and strengthen quality assurance systems. The five countries reviewed sections of each other’s work. Kazakhstan examined Uzbekistan’s energy figures. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan exchanged sectors. The results of the review exercises led to the identification of genuine gaps, their documentation, and the development of plans to fix them. In addition, the experts who conducted the reviews identified issues in their own work and learned from their regional peers how to address the technical questions they faced.
The secondary benefit is that the in-country experts now have a much better understanding of reporting requirements. And the skills involved now sit within the region’s own institutions. Just as importantly, experts who had never collaborated across borders learned how one another’s inventories were put together, which is its own kind of regional infrastructure.
How to Keep the Knowledge From Disappearing
It helps to picture who actually does this work. In most of these countries, the national inventory rests on a small team, sometimes only a handful of specialists. When one of them moves on, a good deal of institutional memory can leave with them. Spreading skills to more people and writing down the methods so the next person can follow them isn’t simply a bureaucratic nicety in that setting. It’s literally how a national reporting system gets built and a pillar of transparency.
We applied the same approach to other aspects of the project. Teams strengthened their inventories for the land-use sector, one of the most technically demanding and data-hungry areas of GHG accounting. They assessed climate policies to inform the next round of national commitments under the Paris Agreement, learning to estimate what a given policy is likely to deliver in terms of emission reductions. And they began shaping shared regional approaches to two harder, newer tasks: how to monitor and report on climate adaptation and how to design green finance taxonomies to steer investment toward climate goals.
None of these is a quick win. Some countries moved further than others, and a few strands are still closer to the starting line than the finish. That’s honest, and it’s also the point. Real institutionalization, turning a useful workshop exercise into a routine that a ministry runs regularly, takes longer than any single grant. What a project like this can do is make that outcome possible: build the skills, document the methods, set up the mechanisms, and leave behind a roster of people who can carry it forward.
This is where the principle of learning by doing earns its keep. A lecture is easy to forget. A method you have applied to your own country’s data, discussing with your own peers, tends to stay with you. By helping national experts do the work themselves, with support rather than substitution, the project results in knowledge that doesn’t evaporate when the contract closes.
The Test Comes After the Funding Ends
It’s tempting in this line of work to measure success by outputs: the number of workshops held, reports filed, people in the room. Those things matter, but they’re not the real test. The real test is what’s still running a year or two after the funding stops. Does the peer review happen again without anyone organizing it from the outside? Do the processes get integrated into the next inventory cycle? Do the trained experts mentor and pass along the skills to the new staff?
We won’t know the full answer for a while, and we’re comfortable with that. Designing yourself out of a job means accepting that the most important results show up after you’re gone. But the early signs across Central Asia are encouraging, and the foundation is the right one.
When GHGMI describes what we do as building capacity, the phrase isn’t decoration. It’s a commitment to a specific kind of help, the kind that is meant to end. The measure of this project will not be how much the region needed us. It will be how little it needs us now.
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