This report examines the governance conditions necessary to ensure the renewable energy transition upholds rather than undermines human rights, equity, and community self-determination. Grounded in the Action for Climate Empowerment pillars of the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, the report argues that accelerating transitions without rights-based, community-centered approaches risks reproducing existing patterns of inequality, extraction, and exclusion. Drawing on case studies from Chile, Estonia, Colombia, Scotland, Canada, and Puerto Rico, it offers a typology of participatory governance mechanisms and proposes concrete pathways for centering the leadership of indigenous peoples, frontline communities, women, and youth in just transition planning and policy.

This report offers a comprehensive blueprint for LDF to set a new participatory, transparent, and equitable climate finance standard. The brief advocates for the LDF to adopt human rights-based safeguards, enhanced direct access, and stresses the necessity of deploying ACE to align with Paris to establish a truly inclusive and justice-centered climate finance mechanism.

This resource is a practical guide to apply our ACE Assessment Framework. It contains guiding questions to assess ACE and indicator selection advice to support countries in designing coherent and ambitious whole-of-society ACE strategies. The framework focuses on four key categories: enabling environment, procedural mechanisms, outcomes, and impacts.

The document defines key elements of quality across various dimensions of ACE, including transparency, public participation, accountability, policy coherence, education, training, public awareness, and collaboration. These definitions, based on the co-designed ACE Observatory Assessment Framework, are used to evaluate countries' progress and categorize their capacity levels.

The framework is intended to be used by governments, civil society, and researchers to build shared understanding, identify goals and gaps, draft commitments, advocate for effective ACE, and evaluate national actions. Developed through global consultations, it assesses enabling environments, processes, and impacts across key ACE elements like participation, transparency, education, and awareness.

Prepared by members of the ACE Cross-Constituency Working Group Convened by the ACE Observatory. Proposal is centered in a challenge clinic for proposal feedback.

Prepared by members of the ACE Cross-Constituency Working Group Convened by the ACE Observatory, includes Global Climate Assembly proposal

Prepared by members of the ACE Cross-Constituency Working Group Convened by the ACE Observatory. It includes linkages with Action for Climate Empowerment