Earlier this month, thousands of delegates traveled to Washington for the annual World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings. In the face of significant financial and political uncertainty from the World Bank Group’s (WBG) largest shareholder, the United States, WBG leadership pressed ahead with a weeklong agenda focused on job creation and poverty reduction. Climate-focused events were less prominent on the official schedule, with discussions instead emphasizing the cascading effects of the energy transition, job creation, emerging markets, strategic investments in health and nutrition, and technology innovations.

Despite this topline shift, civil society leaders continued to discuss the need for climate action and sustainable investments by the WBG, particularly for the most vulnerable and fragile contexts. After the International Development Association (IDA), one of the leading funds for work in fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable (FCV) settings, received a major plus-up in December, the focus has now turned to the next iteration of the FCV Strategy – the approach that will define the WBG’s work in these contexts through 2030.

Alongside these discussions, the Nexus25 project (Center for Climate and Security and Istituto Affari Internazionali) and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a high-level discussion on April 23rd centered around a future-fit FCV approach. This conversation was informed by a discussion paper that offered a few initial areas of focus for the draft strategy:

• Prioritizing areas of broad agreement like global food security;
• Navigating non-traditional governance structures via partnerships;
• Lowering bureaucratic barriers and hidden costs of partnering with IFIs;
• Improving anticipatory action; and
• Making the case for continued and flexible development finance.

Attendees included former US government officials from the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, and USAID; civil society actors; think tanks; and humanitarian organizations working on climate security, humanitarian assistance, food security, and international climate finance.