10 Years into funding, Green Climate Fund Seeks to Update its Strategic Vision and Country Ownership Approach

Ten years after it approved its first projects in October 2015, and following a record year of programming in 2025 with 50 funding proposals worth 3.25 billion approved, the Board of the world’s largest multilateral climate fund, the Green Climate Fund (GCF), started off 2026 with a groundbreaking decision to establish several regional offices. The GCF, celebrating its “10 years of climate impact”, faces much work ahead to fully implement a substantive overhaul of some core operational policies, update its strategic vision, and kick off its third replenishment process mid-year to prepare for the GCF-3 programming period (2028-2031). 

The GCF’s resource mobilization bid comes amidst a thoroughly changed funding landscape struck by the retraction of developed countries’ public finance contributions and the call for the private sector to step in to meet growing financing needs. In this year, tackling outstanding policy gaps on programmatic approaches, environmental and social management, information disclosure, and observer participation should be a priority as the GCF shifts focus to its third replenishment cycle. The funding case for the value add that the GCF brings to the global climate finance architecture, and especially to the implementation of UNFCCC mandates and climate plans in developing countries, should prioritize improving the Fund’s effectiveness and impact over a narrow fixation with efficiency. Effectiveness and lasting impact, and thus real value for money spent, means truly human-rights based, gender-responsive climate finance, direct access for locally-led and locally-owned climate action as well as transparent information about measurable implementation to create accountability and trust. 

Decision on Host Cities for new Regional Offices

At the March meeting (B.44), the 24-member Board took further steps to fully operationalize regional presence by identifying the host cities of the GCF’s future regional offices and one sub-regional office after more than 40 countries submitted host city proposals. Following a special ballot procedure in closed door proceedings, after three days of deliberation and announced as a consensus decision, five cities were selected to ensure regional representation and balance:  Panama City, Panama, for Latin American and the Caribbean;  Amman, Jordan, representing the region of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East; two offices to cover the 54 countries in Africa with Nairobi, Kenya, for the East and Southern Africa region and Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire, for Central, North and West Africa; and lastly, and hard fought over, Suva, Fiji for the Pacific, as a sub-regional office with its regional director based in Songdo. East, Southeast, and South Asia are to be covered by the GCF headquarters in Songdo. The Secretariat has been tasked with advancing regional operationalization, developing a monitoring plan for its effectiveness and reporting back to the Board on its progress at each upcoming meeting. 

During B.44, the Board also advanced several decisions meant to increase its own operational and governance effectiveness. This included an update to the structure and the mandates of its Board committees, for example through a change of quorum requirements to make it easier for Board committees to advance policy work, as well as the comprehensive review of two Board appointed panels to determine their future role and function, namely of the Independent Technical Advisory Panel, which adds a secondary layer of expert review of funding proposals to the Secretariat’s first due diligence assessment, and in particular that of the Accreditation Panel after substantial policy reforms to the accreditation framework approved last year. The number of accredited GCF implementation partners continues to grow, with ten new entities, including six new direct access entities, added at B.44 to a partner network which now totals 168. 

However, although 113 of the accredited entities are developing country national and regional actors, the percentage of approved GCF funding channeled through them seems perpetually stuck around 20 percent, while 55 international access entities receive 80 percent of approved GCF funding, with a particular heavy concentration in a few multilateral development banks and UN agencies, including in many multi-country programs. Indeed, more than half of GCF funding is now committed through programmatic funding approaches (such as multi-country programs or fund-of-fund structures) rather than through the stand-alone projects, including the single country projects most developing countries prefer, but without the GCF ever having adopted a clear, operational definition of what constitutes a “program” or what a programmatic approach overall should be guided by to ensure transparency, accountability, and country ownership. 

The Secretariat argues that country-ownership can be significantly strengthened through establishing a regional presence, which was approved in 2025. While regional presence was welcomed by developing country Board members, developed country representatives tried to strictly curtail the number of regional offices, urging the need to exercise cost control in implementation and insisting on budget neutrality with the expectation that the costs of regional offices can be offset by corresponding operational savings and efficiency gains. The hope is that delegating the entire project cycle from origination to implementation to the regional offices will allow for better engagement with the GCF partner network, particularly of direct access entities, and increase their share of approved GCF funding significantly over time. 

Scaling Back Future Funding Ambition

The GCF started off the year 2026 with a solid commitment authority of over USD 4 billion, which allowed its Board to comfortably approve 18 new funding proposals with a total valuation of USD 960.3 million at B.44 , and should make it possible to keep up the pace and scale of funding approvals for the remaining two Board meetings in in early July and late October of this year. However, its financial future looks less than rosy (although potentially still better than that of some other funds’ such as the Adaptation Fund, which has struggled to receive sufficient pledges to even fulfill its meager resource mobilization goal of USD 300 million for 2026). Given the decline in development and climate finance across Western governments, it is doubtful that for GCF-3, the scale of confirmed pledges of USD 10.64 billion for the current programming period (which already reflects the rescission of the United States USD 4 billion commitment under the by the Trump administration) can even be repeated. 

Acknowledging this new reality, talk of the “50 by 30” vision for the GCF, reaching an aggregate resource mobilization of USD 50 billion by 2030, has quieted down.  This resource mobilization target, with which Executive Director Mafalda Duarte made her entry when she assumed her position in 2024, would require a roughly USD 20 billion replenishment for GCF-3 to fulfill. Instead, the GCF – as other climate funding mechanisms, including the multilateral development banks – is looking at the potential of balance sheet optimization as a way to do more with less, including rethinking the way its commitment authority is calculated. This reevaluation comes in particular in light of a lagging disbursement trend. Only 6.5 billion of the now USD 20.2 billion in GCF funding approved for 353 projects and programs in 134 countries has been disbursed so far, either due to project implementation delays, required restructuring or unmaterialized promised co-financing or leveraged private sector financing. 

The GCF claims a total value of USD 81.2 billion  for its approved projects and programs with around USD 60 billion in expected co-financing and leveraged private sector finance, but does not disclose how much of this has been achieved so far. In addition, the GCF also sets its sight on expanding the contributor base, not only by eyeing financial inputs from developing countries, but also looking at philanthropies, high net worth individuals, and other alternative sources. 

The mantra of doing more with less, by being more focused, more effective, more efficient, and seeking complementarities with other climate finance providers is likely to also dominate the process for updating the GCF’s strategic plan for the next funding period 2028-2031. This process will kick into high gear over the next few months with a public submission period followed by a Board retreat in advance of its next meeting in July and a second one planned for early 2027 to advance the vision, ambition, and strategic positioning of the GCF before a likely pledging conference in the fall of 2027. The GCF in this context increasingly touts its role as a finance and investment match-maker, instead of being just a direct financier, through its work with an increasing number of countries and regions to develop country-owned platforms for investments for climate actions, including using financial support provided through its revamped readiness and preparatory support program, which with close to 900 approved grants worth USD 740 million is the world’s largest climate finance readiness effort of its kind. 

Update to Country Ownership Approach and Understanding

In 2026, the GCF will also focus on an update to its country ownership guidelines to be approved at its October meeting, including ensuring that countries are thoroughly and early on engaged in consultation on funding proposals already at the design stage, instead of often belatedly brought in for the pro-forma country consent through a signature on a no-objection letter by country focal points. Ongoing consultations should also take into account the findings and recommendations by the GCF’s Independent Evaluation Unit (IEU), which presented its evaluation of the GCF’s country ownership approach at B.44. It advocated for a substantial revamp of the currently overly government-centric GCF country ownership approach to a whole-of-society-approach that would see more meaningful and iterative engagement of a diverse set of stakeholders at the national and subnational levels, including communities and often marginalised population segments, such as Indigenous Peoples or women and gender-diverse groups, as well as enhancing their direct access to GCF resources. And while the GCF has recently, if belatedly, finalized a framework a locally-led climate action, and looks at developing a direct access mechanism for Indigenous Peoples in the near future, it does not track how much of its finance reaches local communities or Indigenous Peoples, let alone how much is directly accessible to them under current implementation efforts.

Scheduled for Board consideration at B.45, with consultations ongoing, is also a long-overdue, repeatedly postponed update to the GCF’s gender action plan (GAP) from 2019, which technically expired at the end of 2023. The COP, from which the GCF receives annual guidance, has repeatedly urged the Board and Secretariat to tackle the GAP update as a matter of urgency. While the GCF started out as the first multilateral climate fund to integrate gender considerations in its operational policies from the inception, full and effective gender integration into is programming and the organization itself has not yet been fully realized, despite a clear mandate by its Fund’s governing instrument and its Gender Policy for gender-responsiveness in all of its operations. The upcoming GAP update therefore presents an opportunity to move the GCF in its gender efforts from a focus on mere technical compliance – touting the fact that all of its projects and programs since 2019 developed the required gender assessment and project-specific gender action plan for Board consideration – to creating accountability for gender equality outcomes in funded climate actions. This is also an opportunity for the GCF GAP to contribute to the implementation of the UNFCCC Belém gender action plan. 

While it shows progress to address the update to the GAP and country ownership guidelines this year, the absence of a firm commitment for a policy approach to programmatic funding, the long outstanding effort to develop the GCF’s own environmental and social safeguards (ESS) and thus finally update and complete its environmental and social management system (ESMS), as well as an upgrade of the best practices for information disclosure from the Board’s agenda is concerning. These outstanding policy and framework gaps and reviews are heavily interlinked and urgently needed to ensure transparency, accountability, effectiveness and lasting benefits and impacts, especially for marginalized and already severely climate change-impacted communities and people. 

As the GCF looks to its next 10 years of funding operations, it must focus increasingly on monitoring adequate progress in implementation and accountability for lasting impacts of the projects and programs it finances. It will be important for the GCF to focus on increasing its operational effectiveness and reach while improving equity and fairness in supporting developing countries’ prioritized truly country-owned responses to climate change in alignment with the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement mandates. An adequate resource mobilization with developed countries’ public finance provision at the core thus remains indispensable.