When the Global Environmental Facility Assembly meets in Mexico next week, among the topics for discussion will be how the 183-country partnership can better harmonize its work with the sustainability agenda in its next budget period.
The GEF was set up in 1991 for international cooperation on global environmental issues such as climate change, international fresh and marine waters, chemicals, land degradation and biodiversity. A key question for the Assembly, the GEF’s governing body, will be whether, and how, the GEF’s policies need to change in the next four years in order to fulfil this mandate.
A recent study of the GEF’s performance by the GEF Independent Evaluation Office found much to praise about the GEF’s “intervention logic” and its effectiveness in the past four years. However, the evaluators argue that while GEF interventions are often catalytic, its funding is still dwarfed by the scale of the challenges. Among other things, they recommend expanding the GEF’s funding base and easing the more complex and rigid aspects of the GEF’s current business model.
Another raft of recommendations comes from the GEF’s independent Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP), in the report Delivering Global Environmental Benefits for Sustainable Development: Report to the 5th GEF Assembly. These recommendations focus on better aligning GEF’s approach with the current debate on sustainable development: addressing environmental issues in their full socio-economic and political context, with the core aim of promoting human well-being.
The STAP call for more integrated and holistic approaches to tackling environmental degradation, aiming for multiple benefits from individual actions. Solutions should not only address the environmental “symptoms” within its particular focus areas, but also, for example, seek to enhance ecosystem services, and improve governance systems both within and across national boundaries, and effect transformational, permanent change.
“The GEF Assembly provides an opportunity to debate how best to handle our common environmental goods such as air and water resources. The period of free riding is over, we now urgently need to find sustainable governance and management models to invest in our shared life-support systems,” says SEI Deputy Director Jakob Granit, STAP member for International Waters. “The STAP stands ready to bring in the latest social, economic and natural science to the partnership, in order to support collective action in all regions of the world.”
Read Delivering Global Environmental Benefits for Sustainable Development.
Read the new report The Political Economy of Regionalism: The Relevance for International Waters and the Global Environmental Facility, by Fredrik Söderbaum of the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, and Jakob Granit, SEI.
The Fifth GEF Assembly runs from 25 to 30 May 2014, in Cancún, Mexico. Read more (external link)»
For news from the Assembly follow @JakobGranit on Twitter.
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