Public Participation and Oversight in Climate Finance: A Rapid Assessment Checklist

Description

Climate finance has emerged as one of the most significant and rapidly evolving areas of international development funding. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), for instance, has already committed over USD 20 billion to climate-related projects in more than 100 developing countries. Alongside this, a growing ecosystem of multilateral, bilateral, and national climate funds channel hundreds of billions of dollars each year to governments, banks, NGOs, and private sector actors to drive climate mitigation and adaptation activities.

Yet, the governance of these funds, i.e., how decisions are made, who benefits, how project implementation is monitored, and what happens when goals are not met, remains uneven. Communities most vulnerable to climate change often have the least voice in the projects designed to protect them. Environmental and social safeguards are agreed at international level but do not always translate into practice at the national or subnational level. Corruption risks that are well-documented in other public finance domains are equally present in climate finance but have so far received comparatively limited systematic civil society scrutiny.

Transparency International’s (TI) broader work on public participation, including the SANCUS Assessment Toolkit on Public Participation in Budget Processes (see here), has shown that meaningful and inclusive participation requires the right enabling conditions and robust mechanisms in practice. Beyond this, evaluating and assessing these conditions systematically, and doing so in a way that is grounded in evidence, is a prerequisite for advocacy and reform.

This Rapid Assessment Checklist on Public Participation and Oversight in Climate Finance (PPO Checklist) applies the same overarching logic, though tailored specifically for the climate finance context. Intentionally leaner than a full assessment toolkit, the PPO Checklist contains 11 core indicators, 4 pillars, and a simple traffic light scoring system, designed to be completed in a short amount of time using publicly available information and a small number of key interviews.

Contents

1. Background
2. Scope and Application
3. Methodology
4. PPO Checklist Indicators
5. PPO Checklist Assessment Template
6. Sources of Evidence
7. Public Participation & Oversight: From Findings to Action
8. About the PPO Rapid Assessment Checklist

Authors

Anoukh de Soysa

Date

14/09/2026

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