This paper begins by describing the existing architecture with regard to international funding for environmental actions, focusing on two pre-eminent institutions within this architecture: the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the World Bank. In many respects, the current situation is tending to
move the locus for strategy development and funding decisions for climate-related international investments away from the former and toward the latter. One reason for this shift is the limited impact that the existing system has had in addressing climate change issues, and more broadly, its limited success in channeling sufficient funding to address major environmental concerns such as tropical deforestation. The present system has so far failed to deliver transformational change for the global
environment.