The competition curse

The standard paradigm for awarding climate action resources to organisations and projects (eg research, innovation, infrastructure) involves open competitive tenders or calls, often underpinned by procurement law and accepted practices optimised for excellence and fairness.

This means that every year, millions of hours of time from highly valuable climate change professionals are invested in failed proposals.

The costs to the economy and to the planet of optimising calls/tenders for fairness and not impact can no longer be born. We need to estimate the true scale of the opportunity cost and demonstrate that other structures are possible.