Reconceptualizing the Green Climate Fund’s Project Reconsideration Procedure for Institutional Accountability

This article addresses the design of the project reconsideration procedure of the Green Climate Fund (“GCF”). Operationalized in 2014, the GCF and its governance have been bootstrapped steadily since the Cancun Meeting of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties in 2010. The GCF’s Board of Directors must now institute a procedure that fulfills the right of eligible developing countries to request review of a decision denying funding to a proposed project, but the details of the procedures’ design are still under discussion. After reviewing the GCF’s project selection procedures and evaluating its institutional accountability mechanisms, I propose that the project reconsideration procedure be robustly designed so as to provide institutional review of the GCF’s project selection procedure. Constituting the project reconsideration this way will strengthen GCF’s administrative accountability to the least developed and most climate-vulnerable States of the UNFCCC.