Climate Finance Is There. The Question Is Who Can Actually Reach It.

By Balkan Green Foundation, Eko-svest, Belgrade Open School, and Germanwatch, consortium partners under the Energy Transition and Decarbonisation Project, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The Western Balkans is not only short of climate finance. It is increasingly short of access to it.

For years, the energy transition in the region has been explained through a familiar deficit: not enough funding. Persuasive, and no longer sufficient. The region does require more finance, particularly in coal-dependent economies, where the scale of transformation makes that unavoidable. But the landscape has shifted. Resources are no longer entirely absent. They are structured, conditional, and increasingly selective.

And in that selectivity, something else becomes visible: the gap between finance that exists and finance that can actually be reached.

On 24 March 2026, more than eighty practitioners from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Germany gathered for a virtual expert discussion on financing the just transition, organised as part of the Energy Transition and Decarbonisation Project, implemented by Balkan Green Foundation, Eko-svest, Belgrade Open School, and Germanwatch, with financial support from BMZ. The participants included Nevena Smilevska, Just Transition Coordinator for the Western Balkans at CEE Bankwatch Network; Marion Guénard, Senior Advisor on EU Climate Policy and Franco-German Cooperation at Germanwatch; Ognjan Pantic, Energy Transition Policy Expert at the Belgrade Open School; Irina Avramska Pashovska, from the Ministry of Energy, Mining and Mineral Resources in North Macedonia; and Blerinda Veliu, a sustainability expert working with municipalities and communities in Kosovo.

The conversation moved quickly past targets and frameworks and settled, almost immediately, on something more practical.

Where, exactly, does the process begin to break down?

Participation Shapes What Gets Built

Nevena Smilevska put it directly: the starting point is not funding, but whether local actors are meaningfully included early enough to shape what is being designed. Without that, participation becomes procedural. Consultations held after key parameters are fixed do not produce ownership. They produce compliance.

Across the region, there is no shortage of ideas. Municipalities are exploring district heating improvements, energy efficiency in public buildings, local renewable solutions. Civil society is present, engaged, often well-informed. The language of transition is widely understood.

The Western Balkans uses it fluently.

And yet, as Blerinda Veliu noted, great ideas come from everywhere. The difficulty is not generation. Converting them into projects that can move forward requires support, not just funding, and a system that brings communities in before the decisions are already made.

Ideas rarely arrive in a form that can move.

Where Proposals Stall

Marion Guénard emphasised the increasing role of performance-based frameworks. Projects are expected to align with clear indicators, demonstrate impact, and fit within broader European priorities. This introduces discipline. It also narrows the field considerably.

Those who can structure proposals accordingly move forward. Others remain adjacent to the process, not excluded, but not quite inside.

Irina Avramska Pashovska captured what this means on the ground: in many cases, even basic data is missing. Questions about employment, migration, or local economic structures are difficult to answer with confidence, and yet these are precisely the foundations on which projects are expected to be built. Proposals struggle to move beyond early stages not because they lack relevance, but because they cannot meet the level of detail required.

Feasibility, in this context, is not a technicality. It is the threshold.

Credibility Comes Before Commitment

Ognjan Pantic made an observation that deserves more attention than it typically receives. Scepticism towards the transition does not dissolve through strategies. It shifts when people see something that works in practice.

Until then, the transition remains, for many, an abstraction.

This matters most in coal regions, where the transition is tied to employment, to local economies, to futures that remain genuinely unsettled. Without structured engagement and visible results, the process risks staying conceptually sound and practically distant, a plan that circulates among institutions while the communities it concerns wait to see whether any of it will touch their lives.

Smaller, well-defined projects at the local level do something that policy documents cannot. They make the transition tangible. They also do something less visible, but essential.

They make the transition believable.

The Shared Constraints of a Regional Problem

The Western Balkans is often approached as a set of parallel transitions, each shaped by its own context and pace. This remains true. Yet the underlying constraints are recognisably shared: capacity gaps, data limitations, unclear entry points into financing, participation that arrives too late to shape anything.

Recognising these patterns does not flatten the differences between countries. It allows them to be addressed with greater coherence, and with a more aligned regional voice in a financing environment that is growing more competitive, not less.

The question of finance remains. The region does need more of it, particularly where the social and economic costs of transition are most concentrated.

But volume alone will not close the gap that practitioners across the region identified in March. The deeper question is how access is structured, what capacities are required to engage with it, and whether the systems in place allow ideas at the local level to become projects that can actually move.

Until that layer is strengthened, the transition will continue to develop unevenly. Well-designed and strategically aligned, and, in practice, more selective than it appears. The finance exists. The architecture of access is what now needs to change.

This op-ed reflects insights from a virtual expert discussion on financing the just transition in the Western Balkans, held on 24 March 2026 as part of the Energy Transition and Decarbonisation Project. The project is implemented by a consortium of Balkan Green Foundation (Kosovo), Eko-svest (North Macedonia), Belgrade Open School (Serbia), and Germanwatch (Germany), with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).