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.

Vision

Safe and just future for people and planet.

Mission

To ensure companies are credibly and actively contributing to a nature positive and equitable world by 2030 and beyond. Driving action by strengthening the accountability architecture and supporting  a tight web of accountability stakeholders, who are working globally to incentivize, enable, pressure, and hold corporations accountable for delivering on their nature commitments. 

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

1. Grant-maker: Participatory grant-maker providing funding support for global, early-stage, innovative accountability projects and actors.
2. Orchestrator: Align stakeholders, strengthen accountability architecture, identify accountability gaps and opportunities, capture learnings and insights. 
3. 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.

Stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement is one of the key ingredients for the Accountability Accelerator’s success.

Our stakeholder wheel illustrates the wider community of actors, especially from the Global South. The Accountability Accelerator engages with these stakeholders: as direct beneficiaries of grants, as partners, as agents of influence, or the agents of change that can catalyze corporate accountability.

Accountability Loop

We can build an accounting system through strong collaboration, ratcheting up corporate commitments and engaging them on accountability. An infinity loop forms as corporate models, capital and regulation shift towards sustainable practices, thus building momentum and accelerating the cycle.

1) This process starts with companies understanding their impact and dependencies, planning where they need to focus their efforts on their material impacts, and acting on their targets to deliver operations in line with a safe and just economy. (Steps 1-4)

2) Successful companies track progress in a way that is verifiable and report so that other key accountability actors across the spectrum can monitor compliance and progress in a transparent and data-driven way. (Steps 5-7)

3) Finally, it is critical to elevate the work within the full loop by changing corporate behavior through rule change, better policies, market signals, and consumer demand, effectively shifting from voluntary to mandatory through regulation, fiduciary duty, and other normative structures. (Steps 8-10)

Programs

The Accountability Accelerator works across three Programs: Engagement Clusters (including grantmaking), Resource Delivery, and Target Validation. 

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.

Grants

The Accountability Accelerator is currently funding early-stage projects and organizations that contribute to building an accountability architecture across the four clusters.

Current and past grantees include:

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.

Grant Criteria

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

Resource Delivery

The Accountability Accelerator has engaged with partners to produce several specific resources to enable and grow the accountability ecosystem. 

• Accountability Stakeholder Map

The accountability landscape for corporate commitments related to nature is fragmented with many gaps when it comes to data and standards, finance, legal and campaign efforts and disconnects between different and fragmented actors in the space. This leaves key stakeholders – from advocacy NGOs to investors, lawyers, and grassroots organizations – without information to understand corporate actions and nature crimes and hold them to account for their commitments and actions. To address this, the Accountability Accelerator has undertaken a comprehensive mapping of the nature-focused corporate accountability ecosystem. The result is a global, interactive, visual mapping tool designed to bring transparency and connection to the accountability ecosystem, identifying future grantees as well as gaps to be filled. This work is being expanded with deep dives focused on three global biodiversity hotspots: Amazonia, Southern Africa and the Congo Basin, and South East Asia.

• Nature and Climate Navigation Resource for Companies and Financial Institutions

A resource to orient companies and financial institutions within the landscape of business guidance, management tools, methodologies, and disclosure frameworks that address nature and climate action and transparency.

Target Validation

Coming soon.