The Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action, or NAMA as it has come to be known, first appeared at the 13th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007. Prior to it were the coining of the fundamental ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ principle in 1992 in the Climate Change Convention; its reconfirmation in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997; the operationalization of the Protocol in Marrakech in 2001, and the entering into force of the Protocol just two years earlier in 2005.

The first steps to moving away from this division of labour were taken with the Bali Roadmap, which launched a new process to enhance implementation of the Convention that stipulated a return to 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2000. The Kyoto Protocol revised this for developed countries reducing ‘their overall emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012’ – a target that, despite all controversy about insufficient action, in fact has been achieved. The Bali Action Plan (UNFCCC, 2007) states that in order to ‘Enhance national/ international action on mitigation of climate change’, developing countries will take ‘Nationally appropriate mitigation actions … in the context of sustainable development, supported and enabled by technology, financing and capacity-building, in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner’. This is the first mention of the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) in the international climate change negotiations. From here the concept has evolved, slowly. By 2010, differentiation between internationally supported actions and unilateral actions, for the first time, stipulated that ‘developing country Parties will take nationally appropriate mitigation actions … aimed at achieving a deviation in emissions relative to ‘business as usual’ emissions in 2020 through own initiative and employing their own financial means.’

The 2010 Cancun Agreements establish that ‘developed country Parties shall provide enhanced financial, technological and capacity building support for the preparation and implementation of nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing country Parties’ (UNFCCC, 2010). Cancun also established the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as a vehicle for deploying USD 100 billion per year by 2020 mobilized from developed countries to finance mitigation and adaptation actions in developing countries.