The Global Commons Alliance: Accountability Accelerator Grant

Overview

The Global Commons Alliance’s Accountability Accelerator

The Global Commons Alliance’s Accountability Accelerator (GCAAA) is a global collaborative of philanthropists and practitioners focused on creating a comprehensive accountability ecosystem for nature that scales and accelerates corporate action.

The Accountability Accelerator aims to

Strengthen and accelerate corporate accountability

* Support, through participatory grant-making, organizations working on targets, frameworks, skills, resources, and pressures to push for credible action.

Support the broader accountability ecosystem

* Coordinate and support a tightly woven web of accountability actors, using various tools both in the Global South and North to drive action and push corporate action and accountability for nature.

Influence governments to drive corporate action

* Push governments to demonstrably provide the enabling environment for business & finance to halt and reverse nature loss.

Accountability Accelerator’s Main Functions

Grant-maker

* Participatory grant-maker providing funding support for global, early-stage, innovative accountability projects and actors.

Orchestrator

* Align stakeholders, strengthen accountability architecture, identify accountability gaps and opportunities, capture learnings and insights.

Convener

* Create a safe place to bring all the stakeholders together to learn from each other, think creatively, and spur action.

Approach

The challenges the Accountability Accelerator is setting out to solve are not new but they are complex. The accountability landscape for corporate sustainability is highly fragmented with many gaps in data and standards, lack of coordination, and disconnects between different actors working in different regions of the world.

Accountability is an ecosystem of actors and actions which includes incentives for companies to take the first steps towards a nature-positive economy as well as resources and ongoing support, and finally, putting pressure and holding companies accountable for their commitments and actions. The tighter and more coordinated the web, the less opportunities for inaction and greenwashing. Companies and governments have a crucial role to play and must be engaged in the process.

To achieve our mission, we believe all stakeholders must work together and be supported by a multi-layered accountability ecosystem or architecture with mutually reinforcing and complementary approaches that ensure accountability for all.

Grant Process

The Accountability Accelerator supports the development of a robust accountability ecosystem for corporate action on nature by making mid-sized grants (USD 50,000-100,000) to specific projects that fit with our areas of work. We specifically focus on closing gaps in the accountability landscape and on projects that are early-stage and require higher-risk seed funding that might be deemed too risky by larger funders. The Accountability Accelerator works with applicants to co-develop proposals and accepts proposals on a rolling basis. We pride ourselves in our ability to be reactive and nimble to catch and support urgent and time-sensitive projects.

We support a broad range of projects across different dimensions:

* Structural (top-down) as well as scalable grassroots (bottom-up), 
* Enabling environment and incentives (carrots) as well as pressures and pushes (sticks)
* Projects that focus on rule change (mandatory) as well as culture (voluntary)

Finally, the Accountability Accelerator recognizes and supports the rights and leadership roles of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as stewards of nature and the vast majority of the world’s biodiversity regions. We endeavor to have at least half our grants going to the Global South, where the impacts of global agricultural, manufacturing, and commodity supply chains are most deeply felt on the ground.

Engagement Clusters

The Accountability Accelerator is engaging with corporate accountability actors and stakeholders through four primary levers, referred to as “clusters”:

Data & Standards

* Supporting organizations that are working on standards, frameworks, targets and benchmarks and ensuring that companies take action, assess, commit, transform, and disclose, on their commitments.

Finance

* Engaging, mobilizing, and enabling the finance sector to take action and optimally leverage its role towards a ‘Safe and Just” future for our planet and its people’. Support organizations by providing guidance, targets, methodologies, benchmarks, capacity building, and putting pressure on the financial sector.

Legal

* Reducing corporate actions that are harmful to nature and biodiversity by mandating disclosure, driving ambitious regulation, and enforcing existing legislation while supporting systems changes such as redefining fiduciary duty.

Campaigns

* Incentivising and supporting corporate action towards a nature-positive and equitable world. Increasing corporate accountability through enabling the power of local and global stakeholders. Supporting through grantmaking those working on awareness, youth activism, campaigns, journalism, citizen action, art, and elevating grass-roots efforts, especially in the Global South.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._

* The Accountability Accelerator is currently funding early-stage projects and organizations that contribute to building an accountability architecture across the four clusters.
* The Accountability Accelerator evaluates grant applications based on a range of criteria. These include the following:
* Proposal is aligned with the priorities of the Accountability Accelerator and benefits from the work of the Accelerator
* Contributes to systems change in Accountability through scalable or replicable models
* Proposal addresses a gap in the corporate accountability work and is complementary / partners with other initiatives
* Urgency of funding need and ability to secure other funds elsewhere if we kick-start it
* Is this a project that specifically needs Accountability Accelerator support, noting a preference for true start-up projects
* How the organization will capture and share learnings