One of the most spectacular aspects of the climate agenda has been the emergence of carbon markets. This paper demonstrates that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) provides an opportunity for developing countries, including South Asian countries, to participate in carbon markets.The document underlines that certified emissions reductions (CER) from CDM projects in developing countries can be used to meet reduction commitments in developed countries. However, excluding India, South Asian countries have been shy to invest in promoting CDM, and CDM projects in the region have failed to achieve scale because each project is individually too small and the projects are too scattered. The author concludes that South Asian CDM projects need to be bundled together in order to develop sufficient scale. In this sense, the paper introduces the Programmatic CDM, underscoring the following points:

programmatic CDM is a new approach that allows project developers to register the project design as the programme, while individual projects can be registered under the programme
this helps to reduce the transaction costs and makes it easier to bundle the scattered projects
furthermore, programmatic approaches provide a clear role for the public sector to be involved in development of the project, which helps overcoming the lack of awareness about CDM among domestic market participants
also, CDM can offer ready gateways for access to technology and financing that can be then used to implement the underlying policy objective on which the programme is based
on the other hand, the flexibility of this approach suggests that government integrate the benefit of CDM and carbon markets as a way to advance their own objectives for sustainable growth and enhanced livelihoods
in fact, this kind of integration must become an important part of the South Asian climate response