By Yeonji Kim

Over the past decade, climate finance institutions have made substantial progress in strengthening policies, safeguards, and accountability systems. But why do strong policies and well-designed projects not always translate into lasting impact?

The answer lies in how change actually happens and sustains.  

We have become good at designing commitments

The gender lens offers an important perspective.

Across many climate funds and development institutions, gender equality and women’s empowerment have evolved from peripheral considerations into core requirements. Today, project proposals routinely include gender assessments and action plans, stakeholder consultations, and commitments to inclusive participation.

This progress matters – because policies shape priorities, and standards help institutions move from good intentions to more systematic action.

Enjoying this article? Make sure you always catch our coverage by subscribing to our SDG Update newsletter.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has developed a strong policy foundation on gender, and the GCF Board recently adopted a new Gender Action Plan for 2026-2031 at its 45th meeting (B.45). Prior to this, the Independent Evaluation Unit (IEU) completed an Independent Evaluation of the GCF’s Gender Approach, examining the extent to which gender commitments are being translated into practice.

One of the encouraging evaluation findings was that gender considerations are taken seriously during project design and approval. Many projects intentionally engage both women and men in consultations, work with local women’s groups, and incorporate gender-responsive planning from the outset. I saw examples of this first-hand through my 2024 evaluation visits to Fiji and Tajikistan, where local women leaders and water users’ associations actively engaged in more climate-resilient farming practices and water use in their respective communities, alongside male participants.

In the Marshall Islands, stakeholders also explained to me during my evaluation visit how engagement with GCF projects helped introduce and strengthen gender and youth inclusion practices. Describing it as “a welcome and positive change,” a senior government representative mentioned that such efforts and better awareness influenced not only GCF-funded activities but wider development efforts in the country.

These findings suggest that policy commitments can and do influence institutions and project design. Yet they also raise a deeper question.

Why doesn’t strong policy automatically lead to strong impact?

A common assumption in climate finance and development is that if policies are strong enough, systems are well-designed, and funding and resources are secured, meaningful impact will naturally follow.

However, evidence suggests otherwise.

The recent IEU evaluation of the GCF’s Gender Approach found that compliance with gender requirements tends to be strongest during project preparation and approval stages. Evidence remains less conclusive as to whether these upstream efforts consistently translate into gender-responsive or gender-transformative results downstream.

Policies or strategies can require gender inclusion and equity. Projects can establish grievance mechanisms. Institutions can build systems and procedures. But none of these automatically guarantee changes in participation, agency, decision-making scope and power, behavioral patterns, or long-term outcomes.

Those changes happen somewhere else. They happen in the complex space between project design and everyday reality.

Impact requires more than good project design

One lesson repeatedly emerging from evaluation work is that impact rarely depends solely on infrastructure, project assets, credit and funding, policies, or technical solutions.

One case in point was illustrated by a meta-analysis of evidence by the IEU and DEval, which concluded that people’s access to credit does not necessarily lead to the adoption of climate change adaptation. The 2021 study reviewed 44 quantitative research articles to examine the role that access to credit plays in supporting households in developing countries in adopting adaptation practices in the agricultural sector. The results were mixed at best, signaling that credit alone is not sufficient to enable households’ adoption of climate adaptation measures and that many factors other than access to credit influence individual households’ decisions.  

Impact happens when people, institutions, and behaviors change in practice. This may sound obvious. Yet climate interventions often devote tremendous attention to designing systems, while devoting significantly less attention to understanding how those systems will be adopted, used, maintained, and sustained over time.

This distinction matters. A project can successfully establish new structures and still fail to achieve lasting change. A policy can be fully compliant and yet have limited influence on how people make decisions. Resources can be delivered without producing the outcomes that were originally envisioned. The challenge is not merely implementation – it is adoption and uptake.

The IEU’s evaluation of the GCF’s approach to and portfolio of Climate Information and Early Warning System Interventions (CIEWS) pointed out that the long-term sustainability of the GCF’s CIEWS investments remains an ongoing concern. Project design and review processes do not always adequately account for the practical realities of implementation in local contexts, nor do they consider long-term outcomes.

The missing link: Learning, adaptive management, and behavioral change

This is where implementation, learning, and behavioral insights become particularly important.

One of the recurring observations across climate interventions is that behavior and enabling environments often determine whether project outcomes endure after external support ends.

The IEU’s impact evaluation of the GCF’s FP026 Sustainable Landscapes in Eastern Madagascar (SLEM) project offers a good example. Between 2019 and 2021, the SLEM project disseminated a range of farming techniques, including soil conservation, agroforestry, terracing, irrigation, and off-season rice cultivation. It also offered training through lead farmers as well as project input including equipment, seeds, and fertilizers.

Some practices stayed on while others did not. Low-cost soil conservation practices were more widely adopted and maintained over time. In contrast, labor-intensive and resource-demanding interventions such as irrigation and terracing experienced lower adoption rates, with uptake declining after project support concluded.

From a project management perspective, these interventions may all have been implemented and completed successfully. But from an impact perspective, the outcome is less conclusive or complete because implementation is ultimately mediated through people and the enabling conditions around them – incentives, constraints, knowledge, priorities, social norms, and everyday realities including daily support systems and networks. These cement the ingredients of success together.

This is why learning, feedback loops, and adaptive management matter so much. Project design and implementation should be treated as a package deal and as a continuous cycle of learning, feedback, course correction, and improvement.

When policy and implementation become too distanced and isolated, we risk creating projects that look strong on paper yet struggle to achieve lasting change on the ground. This lesson similarly emerged when I examined the GCF’s revised Strategy of its Readiness and Preparatory Support Programme for 2024-2027 and its operations so far, as part of an ongoing IEU evaluation. Whereas the current Readiness Strategy 2024-2027 represents a stronger strategy in design, the evaluation team could not conclude in its lab report that the stronger strategy has influenced practical conditions through which countries and entities access, use, and sustain climate finance more effectively. This gap between strategy and operational conditions curtails the effectiveness and impact of climate projects and programmes.

What this means for gender mainstreaming

Gender provides one of the clearest illustrations of why compliance and impact are not the same thing.

Strong gender policies, gender action plans, inclusive consultations, and institutional systems all matter. But they are starting points, not endpoints. Women’s empowerment, gender equity, and capacity development cannot be achieved solely through compliance processes.

These ultimately depend on whether projects influence participation, confidence, agency, decision-making power, access to resources, social norms, and opportunities over time. In other words, gender outcomes depend on whether meaningful change becomes embedded in people’s lives and local and national institutions.

The next frontier of climate action

Designing systems, mobilizing resources, and building institutions is essential. But impact does not happen simply because good policies are adopted or projects are approved. Impact happens when people, institutions, and behaviors change in practice.

As climate finance scales globally, one of the most important questions institutions can ask may not be: “Did we fund the right activities?” But rather: “What does it take for change to last?”

* * *

Yeonji Kim is an Evaluation Uptake Specialist with the Independent Evaluation Unit, Green Climate Fund (GCF IEU). The views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not represent the views of the GCF IEU.