The Green Climate Fund: Achieving Complementarity and Coherence among the UNFCCC Financial Institutions

The Green Climate Fund has been heralded as a triumph of the climate change negotiations, but its true role in climate finance has yet to materialize. Significant questions remain unresolved and negotiations are mired in the same developed versus developing country controversies that have stymied other avenues of climate finance. With this legacy to overcome, the Green Climate Fund’s full and robust operationalization and impact on climate change is unclear. In fact, participants left an initial meeting to mobilize resources for the Green Climate Fund in June of 2014 without so much as agreement on a target for future resource mobilization. Critical to achieving the goals of the Green Climate Fund and the broader, now fragmented, climate finance regime is a deep understanding of historical and entrenched debates as well as the governance and mechanics of the various UNFCCC financial institutions, and this paper provides a synthesis of this backdrop. Although it does not offer a panacea-type solution, this paper does suggest that alternative top-down or bottom-up approaches strategically employing the Standing Committee on Finance or Designated National Authorities, respectively, may at least represent pathways toward efficient and effective climate finance.