The world’s largest climate fund, the Green Climate Fund, has been running now for more than a decade. Three years ago, Jyotsna Puri, otherwise known as Jo, was brought in to head the Fund’s Independent Evaluation Unit, analyzing its machinery to make sure it’s staying on track.
“Faster, smarter, better is basically what I think about all the time,” says Puri, who spent more than 20 years prior bouncing between the World Bank, branches of the United Nations, teaching positions at Colombia University and authoring multiple books.
Yet what makes Puri exceptional as an evaluator is that in order to push toward optimum impact and efficiency of the Fund’s resources, she goes a step beyond the data to the “three b’s,” as she likes to say: bias, benefits and behavior. How do these affect people’s decisions on how they treat the planet? And how can the Green Climate Fund address this fundamental issue rather than the symptoms?
“Climate change is your best example of inaction of those who have all the knowledge,” she says. “People change behavior when you set up the incentives and when you set up the infrastructure to make change possible.” Consider her a key architect.
