The European Climate Foundation (ECF) was established in 2008 to accelerate progress towards low-carbon societies. ECF hosts the Pool-fund on International Energy (PIE) that supports global efforts to bring about decarbonisation in the context of development, equity, justice and sustainability. This fund is situated in the International Energy Programme at ECF and it supports strategies, convenes partners and stakeholders and makes grants in order to support an energy transition away from coal towards clean energy. The present role will drive implementation of this fund.
The fund was initiated in 2013 to globalise work on coal transition. It performed the role of building and supporting new national efforts in countries with a high risk of coal exposure and building and strengthening trans-national efforts in support of the national work everywhere. The fund has grown in scale every year to such an extent that Asia work has now been spun out into its own entity. The fund retains a role with Africa and the Americas, but its core role is increasingly to focus on the trans-national effort in support of all geographies – data and analysis, the finance sector, networks and learning and incubating new work on industrial coal and other emerging priority areas.
The style of the programme is to incubate and innovate and retain a laser-focus on the cause. The fund operates as the centre-of-gravity on the global effort working intensively with re-granting foundations responsible for this work in Asia, Europe, the US, Australia and China. But only this programme holds an international overview and takes responsibility for trans-national interventions.
The Director will lead on strategy and implementation of a number of the fund’s grant making themes and specifically will work in collaboration with Sunrise Project on transnational finance. In addition, they will play a lead role including developing the management and tracking system for transnational finance grants and overseeing other initiatives and will also deputise for the senior director. The role will have a small number of line reports.
The role reports to the Director, International Energy Programme who works with foundations on global strategy and prioritisation and in partnership with the Director for International Clean Energy.
The Director for International Energy Transition will be responsible for developing strategy and managing implementation of the PIE fund’s programme. Responsibilities include:
Strategy synthesis, determination and implementation: support the Senior Director, team, and key external strategy advisors in operationalizing key workstreams in the overall programme , related priorities and budgets;
Transnational finance grant making: developing and executing a monitoring and evaluating process and impact of initiatives and grants; and acting as a liaison to report regular progress to funders and our team. Additionally, administering grant making process of this line of work, including refining the scope of work for different steams of programme grant making; validating and refining proposals from potential partners; drafting recommendations for the consideration of the team and our funders;
Alignment with the general international programmes at ECF and with the strategies of foundation partners;
Building and maintaining strong relationships with external actors and opinion formers to inform strategy and improve effectiveness – across civil society, labour, business and government;
Building and maintaining productive relationships with grantees and other direct partners, to support strong collaboration and a creative shared approach to problem-solving;
Working closely with internal and external partners to draw down useful insights and learning into the programme;
Commissioning impactful research and convening stakeholders and partners;
External representation of the programme;
Location is flexible however a European time zone is most practical given the need to work with Asia, Europe and the US. The candidate will need to demonstrate their ability to fulfill the demands of the role from their preferred location which can include a home office.
Candidates need to be in the possession of a work permit for the work location, if applicable
All applications will be treated confidentially. We will store your information in our internal database unless you specifically request otherwise.