| Nouakchott, Mauritania |
“We need a balance between the urgency to achieve results and the due diligence required to protect climate money and ensure its effectiveness,” said Lisa Ann Elges, head of TI’s climate governance integrity programme.
The proposed arrangements allow just two civil society observers to participate actively in board meetings, one each from the developed and developing worlds - the same level of representation allotted for the private sector. Guidelines say an active observer may speak but not vote.
Researchers and climate activists are concerned that the private sector may be given too large a role in running projects financed by the fund, and it will be difficult to track what businesses are doing.
But access to the fund's resources for companies and private financial institutions is regarded by some debt-laden wealthy governments as a carrot to raise additional money from private sources - without which they are reluctant to loosen their own purse strings.
"There is an understanding that the more the Green Climate Fund is private investor-friendly, the more likely it is that developed countries will put money in," said Janet Redman of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.
RIGHT TO OBJECT
She and other experts want rules to ensure that private-sector activities financed by the fund will not undermine the development of poorer nations and vulnerable people who rarely get a say in such decisions.
"The private sector has its motives, but these have to line up with the interests and priorities of developing-country governments and what the people who are going to be most impacted by climate change want and need," Redman told AlertNet. More
