The GEF seeks transformative investments to deliver systemic change and durable global environmental benefits. What qualifies as a transformative goal should be clearly specified and plausible. STAP recommends that the GEF should require that a transformative investment involves a pathway to durable change at a sufficient scale to deliver a step improvement in one or more global environmental benefits. This information brief recommends that the GEF should: be clear which investments in its portfolio are expected to be truly transformative, and for these; test the goals of the investments to ensure they have sufficiently transformative ambition; and ensure that the design of the activities provide credible pathways to achieve this transformative ambition.
Additionally, the brief touches upon metrics for monitoring and learning about transformation. Because significant transformational change usually takes time, it is particularly important to monitor an array of indicators of progress on various processes of scaling to enable an investment to be adaptive and to learn rapidly about the success of the scaling logic. Five categories of potential metrics for this purpose are illustrated in the brief.
