The production of adaptation results: how does the Green Climate Fund turn adaptation projects into impact?

How to measure the impact of adaptation investments is a topic of intense policy and scholarly debate, which presents political and technical challenges. The multilateral climate funds within the UNFCCC offer some of the most significant experience to date of adapting to climate change and play a role in setting the agenda for others funding adaptation. Yet little is known about the results practices these funds use to create and sustain reporting on adaptation impact. This paper uses documentary analysis and interview data to analyse how adaptation results are developed and reported through a portfolio framework in the Green Climate Fund (GCF), with what effects. This paper makes two contributions to policy and scholarly debate on measuring adaptation results. Firstly, it contributes an empirical case study of practices around adaptation results frameworks, an area with limited scholarly attention, and shows the constitutive effects of these processes. It shows how the conceptual leaps between different levels of results act to obscure the links to longer-term impact. The aggregation of the portfolio serves political actors but does not contribute significantly to learning or accountability. Secondly, it contributes to literature on the GCF itself, showing how the pressures of quantifying impact and providing appropriate numbers risk steering the portfolio away from two of the GCF’s foundational principles: country ownership and transformation. This paper can support reporting on the global goal on adaptation, showing how results practices that seek to aggregate diverse contexts risk creating numbers with symbolic value but limited validity.Key policy insights Conceptual gaps between GCF project outcomes and the impact reported through portfolio results frameworks should be openly acknowledged when communicating fund results.The demands of the GCF’s results framework can slow project design and limit the potential for country ownership – the potential benefits from the information gained need to be balanced against this.Aggregated impact figures support contributors to continue to invest in the Fund but prioritize scale in terms of beneficiary numbers rather than depth of local impact.Stakeholders implementing other global frameworks such as the UAE-FGCR should consider the potential constitutive effects of aggregating across diverse contexts, including the knowledge gaps it obscures and the potential for false comfort.