Annual ministerial meetings serve as an important platform to advance international collaboration to accelerate the adoption of clean energy policies and practices worldwide. Energy ministers from 24 participating countries and the European Commission come together to assess progress and guide work under the concrete and transformative clean energy initiatives. Ministerial meetings also provide an opportunity for high-level engagement with private-sector stakeholders in a variety of formats, ranging from public panel sessions to roundtable discussions with ministers, global company leaders, entrepreneurs, and other experts.

The CEM is currently the only regular meeting of energy ministers at which they exclusively discuss clean energy. The CEM also includes involvement from other ministries that play an important role in clean energy in some governments, such as ministries of science and technology or economics.

International collaboration under the Clean Energy Ministerial is action-oriented and flexible; there are no negotiated texts or binding agreements. The CEM is based on a distributed leadership approach where any government interested in furthering a substantive idea on a clean energy technology or issue is encouraged to identify willing partners and proceed.

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