Skip to main content
12 November 2026

Latin America highlights: new policy roadmaps and budget tools for Argentina and Guatemala

Sustainability priorities tend to live in strategies and commitments. Whether they shape everyday economic decisions depends on something less visible: whether the actors and institutions behind those decisions have the methods and the capacity to act on them. Building that layer – through budgets, action plans, procurement, specific policies – is what PAGE’s support is for: countries set the priorities, and PAGE assists with evidence, policy advice and capacity development. 

Recent milestones achieved in Latin America show this in practice. Argentina now has a roadmap of policy options for its circular economy, drawn from a new PAGE-supported assessment. Guatemala’s Ministry of Public Finance has a sustainable budgeting methodology adapted to the country and the capacity to apply it, and the country has laid the basis for a Sustainable Public Procurement Policy. And at a South-South Exchange in El Salvador from 3 to 5 November, Guatemala shared the lessons of adapting the Sustainable Budgeting Approach with El Salvador and Rwanda.  

Argentina: a policy roadmap for the circular economy

Argentina now has an updated, policy-oriented assessment of its circular economy potential and of the policy options advance it. The study  “Economía circular y producción sostenible en Argentina: hallazgos estratégicos y recomendaciones de política pública” builds on earlier PAGE-supported work on circular economy in Argentina, including the 2021 feasibility study for a national circular economy plan. 

The new study provides national decision-makers with a sequenced roadmap proposing circular criteria for the existing sustainable procurement decree and the investment incentive regime and new longer-term building blocks: a national circular economy strategy to 2030, a framework law on producer responsibility and a national system for tracking material flows, the data the study says is missing to plan and calibrate circular policies. 

Behind these options sit the challenges the study identifies: productive and environmental policies that do not align, prices that favour virgin over secondary materials, missing national material flow accounts, and secondary markets where supply is fragmented. The study also puts a figure on who stands to gain, pointing to some 150,000 people working in urban waste recovery whose formalization it lists as a priority. Throughout, circularity is treated as part of the transformation of productive systems rather than a stand-alone environment issue, in line with the UN Environment Assembly Resolution 4/1 and PAGE’s approach to green transition. 

Guatemala: sustainability built into budget analysis and public procurement

Guatemala’s Environmental Fiscal Strategy aims to align public finance with the country’s environmental priorities. The question for the Ministry of Public Finance (MINFIN) was how  how to bring economic, social and environmental considerations into public finance analysis in a systematic way. With PAGE support, MINFIN adopted and applied a the Sustainable Budgeting Approach (SBA), a method developed by UNEP with the University of Oxford. This build on earlier work that helped municipalities track their environmental spending and set environmental criteria for public purchasing.  

MINFIN now has a methodology for sustainable budgeting adjusted to Guatemala’s conditions and the capacity to further use in the future. The pilot also showed what it takes to use the method routinely: which data the ministry needs, how institutions have to coordinate, and where the methodology itself needs adjusting. Those lessons now form a set of recommendations for keeping it in use. 

Public procurement was the second front. Over a three-session training with PAGE, MINFIN  examined how sustainability criteria can be applied to public purchasing and how existing tools and initiatives fit together. Bringing together the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN), the Ministry of Finance (MINECO), Ministry of Labour (MINTRAB) and the Secretary of Planning and Programming of the Presidency, the training mapped out the building blocks of a future Sustainable Public Procurement Policy  —who does what, which sustainability criteria apply, how ready suppliers are and what to implement first. 

South-South Exchange: Guatemala, El Salvador and Rwanda compare notes on sustainable public finance

From 3 to 5 November, organized through a complementary a UNPDF project, from Guatemala’s MINFIN and El Salvador’s Ministries of International Cooperation, National Planning, Finance, Environment, Transport and Water, met in El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, for a South-South exchange on sustainable public finance, budgeting and infrastructure. They were joined remotely by a delegation from Rwanda’s Climate Change and Development Network. Each country brought a different piece of the same puzzle: Guatemala its experience adapting the Sustainable Budgeting Approach within its Environmental Fiscal Strategy; El Salvador its use of the same approach, together with UNEP’s EnABLE tool, to finance sustainable infrastructure; and Rwanda its Green Taxonomy and investment in nature-based infrastructure.

Comparing the three experiences pointed to the same needs – better data, closer coordination between institutions and more technical capacity. Conclusions from the exchange will go into the final technical outputs of the El Salvador’s Sustainable Infrastructure Roadmap.

DCIM/100MEDIA/DJI_0539.JPG

Funding partners

  • Germany BMUV logo
  • AR 2025 - Finland Logo
  • AR 2025 - Norway Logo
  • AR 2025 - Korea Logo
  • AR 2025 - SIDA Logo
  • AR 2025 - Swiss Logo
Share Latin America highlights: new policy roadmaps and budget tools for Argentina and Guatemala
Scroll to top