Foreword

This report presents the main findings and conclusions from the project on “Low-Carbon Public Spending at the National Level in Kyrgyzstan: Designing a Green Public Investment Programme”, implemented within the framework of co-operation between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Kyrgyz Republic (henceforth, also Kyrgyzstan), as well as the GREEN Action Task Force, for which the OECD provides a secretariat.

The main objective of the OECD-Kyrgyzstan co-operation was to assist the partner country in setting out on a greener development path, in particular by reducing the energy and carbon intensity of its economy. Its approach involved assisting the Ministry of Economy to design a green public investment programme in line with good international practices. It aims to demonstrate in practice how to use scarce public funds to encourage the private sector to invest in clean and socially important projects.

The specific focus of the Clean Public Transport (CPT) Programme is on reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the public transport sector. Two cities were identified to participate in the first pilot phase of the investment programme: Bishkek and Osh. In its second phase, the programme is designed to be extended to cover the suburban areas of the two pilot cities and some key inter-city connections in Kyrgyzstan.

The programme contained four main activity areas and outputs: 1) an initial scoping and analytical stage; 2) a costing methodology; 3) a programme design aligned with international good practice; and 4) an analytical report and training. This report summarises the results.

The report provides an extensive review of environmental legislation – reflecting standards in Kyrgyzstan and the European Union – and technical regulations regarding public transport. It also offers an extensive collection of primary and secondary data on the environment, transport and public services. The stocktaking analysis took into account the country’s national green growth and climate change commitments and budgetary requirements. The report also draws on several visits by the project team to Kyrgyzstan in 2018, where they discussed various elements of the investment programme with a number of experts from government offices and local public administrations in Bishkek and Osh, as well as with experts from various international and non-government organisations active in the country.

This project builds on previous work carried out by the OECD in the areas of public environmental expenditure management, integrating the environmental sector into medium-term budgetary processes and on climate change economics. More specifically, it uses a programme costing methodology (called OPTIC) that was developed by the OECD, with support by Germany, and tested previously in Kazakhstan. The methodology is focused on climate-related investment programmes.

The project in Kyrgyzstan was financially supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), through its 2014 International Climate Initiative (IKI). It is part of a regional programme – “Strengthening public finance capacity for green investments in the countries of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA)” – that included two other country case studies: Kazakhstan (completed in 2017) and Moldova (completed in 2019).

Foreword