Climate finance is only as good as the accountability systems that govern it. Yet across the world, those systems routinely fail the communities most exposed to climate risk. Accountability mechanisms such as grievance and appeals processes, oversight bodies and budget tagging and tracking exist. But in practice, accountability depends on multiple factors — from political will and power dynamics to sustained pressure from below. To shift climate governance from token responses toward true accountability, countries need lasting, systemic change in how power is shared.The path to achieving this goal is strewn with challenges unique to the local context. While civil society organizations navigate complex and often unpredictable political realities unique to their countries, there are lessons to be shared across borders.’Green Accountability’ Can Help Deliver Finance EquitablyResolving climate injustice globally hinges on addressing power imbalances across countries and within societies. Crucially, for climate finance to be delivered equitably, equipping and incentivizing governance institutions to respond to citizens is crucial. This is key to just transitions, embedding the principles of locally-led adaptation into systems and practice, and efforts to mobilize domestic finance that align climate action with socially equitable development policy.’Green accountability’ is about ensuring that those who face the most risk can have timely access to information, can influence decisions that impact them and make public authorities answer to them when commitments are not met.From 2024 to 2026, the Green Accountability Platform, a consortium launched by WRI, SouthSouthNorth and the Huairou Commission — under a grant from the World Bank Global Partnership for Social Accountability — supported 25 civil society organizations in enhancing climate accountability in five countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, Mexico and Senegal. To support broader learning, the platform also facilitated a community of practice to share strategies, tools and lessons among grantees, grassroots organizations and green accountability practitioners worldwide.Grant recipients were selected through an open, competitive process designed to enable participation from lower-budget and lower-capacity organizations — prioritizing demonstrated constituencies, clearly identified challenges and compelling influence strategies over organizational size.Through these grants, recipient organizations worked in collaboration with communities and relevant government institutions to influence, implement and monitor climate finance processes and decisions across several priority areas, including adaptation, energy transitions, disaster risk management and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+).Holding Powerful Authorities Accountable for Climate ActionThe availability of formal accountability mechanisms depend on the source (i.e., multilateral, domestic, bilateral, private) as well as the strength of domestic legal frameworks. However, these may be limited in scope or fail to shift long-term incentives, such as when international financial institutions continue to lend to projects or entities with ongoing grievances. In reality, however, what counts as accountability is often contested or difficult to define, doesn’t reflect civil society’s priorities, and ultimately depends on the discretion and values of those in power — especially in countries with weak governance or where the law may be applied unevenly.This initiative sought to support community-based organizations in addressing the challenge of holding those in power accountable while recognizing that the process is rarely straightforward. In Senegal, Bangladesh and Brazil, the consortium identified gaps in planning cycles, budget processes and legal frameworks and worked to build in-country coalitions to convert community priorities into formal government commitments.Senegal: Embedding Gender and Social Equity into the Just Energy Transition Investment PlanIn June 2023, Senegal announced the launch of a 2.5 billion euro ($2.9 billion) Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) just as its first offshore oil and gas discoveries began production. In response, the following year, Active Citizens for Social Justice (Citoyens Actifs pour la Justice Sociale, or CAJUST) joined forces with other civil society organizations to launch the country’s Platform of Civil Society Actors for a Just Energy Transition. The aim of the platforms was to mobilize civil society and communities to engage more effectively in the JETP process.Leveraging its existing relationships with the communities of Thies, Saint Louis and Fatick, CAJUST amplified the climate, economic and social risks and concerns these communities were facing from coastal erosion, salinization and food insecurity — compounded by conflict between artisanal fishers and extractive companies over access to fishing areas near oil and gas platforms.With support from the Green Accountability Platform, CAJUST worked to deepen accountability in Senegal more broadly by organizing capacity-building workshops for community members and journalists, which later evolved into community-led forums to bring concerns and demands in front of government decision-makers and industry representatives involved in extractive activities. CAJUST convenes local officials and community members from the city of Thies, Senegal, to discuss how to enable local engagement in Senegal’s Just Energy Transition Plan. Photo by CAJUST. As a result of CAJUST’s efforts, Senegal included a social equity indicator in its Just Energy Transition Investment Plan and incorporated community inputs into its NDC 3.0 revision. Additional successes included greater transparency on methane emissions in annual emissions reporting and a commitment to develop a national climate law. In early 2026, this commitment began to materialize as parliamentarians met with civil society representatives to gather input into the draft.While it’s too early to determine if Senegal’s JETP governance process will catalyze long-term accountability and deliver on climate and just transition goals, CAJUST’s experience demonstrates how accountability can move from paper to practice.Bangladesh: Strengthening Accountability Amid Political UpheavalAfter the fall of the previous political regime in 2024, Bangladesh plunged into severe administrative turmoil. National government positions went unfilled, public services fractured and the traditional institutional pathways to advocate for national climate action were instantly blocked. At the smallest local government level — the union parishads —elected officials vacated their positions, creating a vacuum that allowed powerful local interest groups to disrupt public functions and mismanage climate resources.Realizing national channels were frozen, local partners under the Green Accountability Platform like the Participatory Research and Action Network (PRAAN) and the WAVE Foundation pivoted to working with union parishad secretaries after seeing that they were more responsive to community demands. PRAAN conducted participatory rural appraisals across all districts of the climate-vulnerable and underserved Mohammadpur and Char Clark union parishads to understand how climate-induced hazards were impacting households, what adaptation and planning actions they had taken, individually and collectively, and how they were engaging with local governments. Residents of both union parishads have faced frequent flooding, salinity intrusion and river erosion, such as in August 2024 when homes, fields and roads were submerged for a month, causing major financial losses and exacerbating food insecurity. PRAAN leveraged local networks to establish climate action forums in each union parishad to bridge the gap between marginalized communities (farmers, fishers, women and youth) and local government administrations. Women members of the Union Climate Action Forums from Mohammadpur and Char Clark unions in Bangladesh take part in a PRAAN learning exchange visit on locally led climate-adaptive farming and livelihood practice. Photo by PRAAN. Through these forums, PRAAN facilitated open budget sessions and social audits of adaptation plan implementation, installing climate feedback and complaint mechanisms within union parishad offices. By late 2025, local governments formally ratified community-identified adaptation plans, legally allocating 5% of their fiscal year 2025-2026 budgets directly to these priorities.In these vulnerable areas, PRAAN demonstrated how civil society organizations with strong relationships with both communities and local officials, coupled with the ability to assess the political economic space, can deepen accountability via locally led climate action.In the coastal districts of Patuakhali and Barguna, which are vulnerable to erosion, cyclones and flooding, the WAVE Foundation addressed a systemic governance bottleneck. Official disaster management committees (DMCs) existed on paper but were functionally inactive, lacking the transparency required to distribute aid equitably.WAVE executed a targeted revitalization campaign across four upazilas (an administrative unit similar to a county) and 32 union parishads. They started by establishing 38 civic forums and conducting 192 targeted awareness sessions. Subsequently, they trained nearly 6,700 participants on a range of local climate governance processes — from planning, to budgeting, to implementing accountability tools such as social audits and community scorecards. These efforts were aimed at strategically connecting grassroots monitors with local officials and investigative journalists. Eventually, this mobilization bore fruit and reactivated the DMCs. With increased public and media scrutiny, they began utilizing public hearings and social accountability tools to monitor climate expenditures, drastically reducing leakages in disaster aid distribution.The Bangladesh examples show that when national political systems fracture, resilient civil society groups can protect climate finance by empowering local administrative actors and institutionalizing accountability at the absolute grassroots level.While long-term institutional permanence requires sustained investment, Bangladesh’s overarching national strategy offers strong structural incentives to deepen this local accountability framework.Brazil: Using Data and Law to Hold Forest Carbon Markets AccountableIn Brazil, Green Accountability Platform partners worked to bolster climate finance accountability by enhancing scrutiny and public pressure in federal budgeting processes. For example, it leveraged coalitions of journalists, Indigenous and community leaders to apply Brazil’s longstanding Right to Information Law to climate finance. Additionally, it triggered formal oversight on upholding Indigenous rights in REDD+ processes.In the state of Acre, Green Accountability Platform partner Instituto Fronteiras created a REDD+ Juruá Observatory to aggregate data on territorial violations affecting Indigenous and traditional communities from 21 private and one jurisdictional REDD+ projects covering 9.1 million hectares. It then provided this evidence to the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF), successfully triggering a formal legal recommendation that mandated the state to enforce Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation (FPIC) within Acre’s jurisdictional REDD+ program. Karla Sessin-Dilascio leads a workshop on REDD+ in the Puyanawa’s Indigenous Land (part of Brazil’s Mâncio Lima-Acre). Photo by WRI. Photo by Instituto Fronteiras. Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC) produced technical notes and budget analyses to influence the debate on Brazil’s 2026 Budget bill, providing forensic analysis that led to amendments to the 2026 Budget Guidelines Law. They also established a Budget Working Group within the National Congress’s Mixed Parliamentary Environmental Front to support climate finance tracking in Brazil’s parliamentary budget negotiations. In seeking to build a coalition of parliamentary supporters, INESC leveraged its technical analysis while building a broader coalition of civil society actors to increase political pressure on more reticent actors.The Brazil example highlights best practices for strengthening institutional response to ensure enforcement of environmental rights and aligning budgets to climate commitments in a politically polarized environment.Lessons Learned for Deepening Accountability in Policy and Practice1) Embed accountability into existing planning and budget cycles.The examples from Bangladesh demonstrate that civil society organizations can credibly influence planning and budgeting decisions of local and national authorities. Civil society organizations can mobilize climate finance through direct collaboration and technical support, as well as through advocacy with community partners, media and other stakeholders. When officials witness that their decisions win public support, and when community members see actions in response to their engagement, there can be a mutually reinforcing cycle. In the case of Bangladesh, accountability traction materialized when participatory risk assessments and local adaptation priorities were converted into formal plans and budget lines (union parishads; disaster management committees), reinforced by social audits and grievance channels.2) Match your strategy to where power actually sits.INESC in Brazil combined its technical proficiency in climate adaptation finance mechanisms and the parliamentary budget amendment processes with astute political economy analysis to create a broader coalition of parliamentarians and non-governmental stakeholders to influence how adaptation finance is addressed through domestic budgets.Focused on whether and how Indigenous and traditional communities were able to uphold their rights in carbon markets, Instituto Fronteiras created a transparent geospatial data system to reduce information asymmetry for Indigenous groups in REDD+ governance. Leveraging the legal requirement for FPIC in Brazil’s 2024 carbon market law, along with the transparent data infrastructure, it built a compelling case for the federal prosecutor’s office to take action.3) Combine technical credibility with grassroots mobilization.In Senegal, CAJUST leveraged its deep relationships with coastal communities and its fluency in creating compelling media storylines, to work through the multi-stakeholder PACTEJ coalition and achieve considerable progress in building trust between fishing communities, the government and extractive oil and gas industries. At the same time, it successfully translated social equity commitments into indicators in Senegal’s recently released Just Energy Transition Investment Plan.Building Accountability That LastsThe examples from Bangladesh, Brazil and Senegal illustrate that accountable responsiveness in climate finance is not achieved through formal mechanisms alone — it is built through relationships, strategy, sustained civil society engagement and surfacing community needs and concerns to decision-makers. Whether embedding social equity indicators into a just energy transition plan, converting participatory risk assessments into formal budget lines or using legal frameworks to enforce Indigenous rights in carbon markets, the successes achieved under the Green Accountability Platform demonstrate that shifting power requires working both with and against the grain of existing institutions.Several conditions appear to enable progress:Involvement of civil society organizations with deep community trust, strong relationships and credible standing with government.Coalitions that combine technical capacity with grassroots mobilization.The ability to read political openings in a changing landscape and adapt accordingly.External partners can support this work by providing flexible, long-term funding that allows local organizations to respond to shifting political contexts — a lesson made vivid by Bangladesh’s political upheaval — and by investing in shared learning across country contexts.As overseas development assistance continues to contract, the stakes for getting accountability right grow higher. The evidence from the Green Accountability Platform’s activities suggests that even under constrained conditions, civil society coalitions can create meaningful improvements with scope for lasting change.