The Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) Programme investigates alternatives to high-carbon development pathways through national scenario planning processes. MAPS is a community of collaborating developing country governments, researchers, and industry and civil society leaders. The collaboration is establishing the evidence base for long-term transition to robust economies that are both carbon efficient and climate resilient. In this way MAPS contributes to ambitious climate change mitigation that aligns economic development with poverty alleviation.

Currently, the MAPS Programme is involved in four national-level government mandated processes in Brazil, Chile  Colombia and Peru with an international research and coordination team based in South Africa. The current programme grew from methodologies devised during the South African Long Term Mitigation Scenarios project. Central to the collaboration is the way in which the "MAPS approach" to development planning combines innovative research and stakeholder engagement technologies with government mandated planning processes. The MAPS 101 explainer video tries to summarise this approach in a succinct and visually engaging style.

CDKN is actively engaged with the MAPS Programme on two fronts. It is supporting MAPS researchers to improve the economic and sectoral modeling tools that are central to generating the evidence base in the different national contexts. Secondly, it supported a scoping exercise to gauge the feasibility of similar processes in several African countries.