Strategic Stakeholder Engagement for the FAST-P Office 

We supported the FAST-P Office in designing and delivering a strategic stakeholder engagement process to build alignment, credibility and shared ownership across its transition finance ecosystem. 

Asia requires an estimated US$2 trillion a year in climate-related investment. Closing its decarbonisation and climate resilience financing gap demands capital at a scale and pace traditional structures struggle to deliver. Given the vast pool of private capital in Asia, the challenge is less about finding more capital than about building structures that blend different forms of capital together to unlock more investable opportunities. However, blended finance has proven difficult to scale, with successes remaining limited to a transaction level. 

Financing Asia’s Transition Partnership (FAST-P) was launched to respond to this challenge, aiming to mobilise US$5 billion by combining commercial capital with catalytic and concessional funding from public, philanthropic and development finance partners across three thematic pillars. The key difference was to use a blended structure at a fund-level, using catalytic capital to reduce risk for commercial parties, and thereby increasing the pipeline of investable climate-focused projects. As investable models get proven and replicated, the aim is to reduce the need for catalytic capital to drive the climate agenda over time. The FAST-P Office was established to support the mobilisation of capital and to manage the initiative and its stakeholder ecosystem, a role made more demanding by the fact that balancing risk allocation across partners is frontloaded in this model. 

Steward Redqueen supported the Office in navigating this complexity by designing and delivering a strategic stakeholder engagement exercise. Through interviews, surveys and analysis, we identified where stakeholder objectives converged, where perspectives differed, and the motivations underlying these views. We then translated these perspectives from across FAST-P’s partner base into a shared direction for the initiative’s priorities, role and future development. 

The engagement resulted in a materiality map refining the Office’s priorities, a Theory of Change clarifying how those priorities translate into impact, recommendations on streamlining sustainability and impact considerations across the FAST-P pillars in line with requirements of catalytic capital providers, and communications guidance to help the Office proactively engage potential partners to continue scaling the partnership.