ABSTRACT
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) exists to fund global environmental benefits through international development projects. Interim financial mechanism to the United Nations conventions on climate change and biodiversity, it is also hoped that it will green its parent, the World Bank, and help reform the UN. Some NGO commentators castigate GEF as greenwash for a sick system; others – part of the tacit coalition that created it – prefer to render the facility more transparent, participatory and thereby effective. The environmental movement’s responses to GEF’s need for legitimation in ‘civil society’ may begin to transcend a quandary faced in many movements for social change: whether to enter, adjust and utilise the institutional structures within which problems arise, or to avoid co-option by challenging the system from outside.
