As Kenya Grants Sweeping Powers to Climate Group, Questions Mount Over Sovereignty and the New Global Order

NAIROBI, Kenya — On a sweltering July morning, as President William Ruto laid the cornerstone for what would become the gleaming new headquarters of the Global Centre for Adaptation, he painted a vision of Kenya as the vanguard of climate resilience, a beacon for the developing world.

Standing beside Ban Ki-moon, the former United Nations secretary general who co-founded the organization, Ruto spoke of partnership and progress, of turning vulnerability into opportunity.

What he did not mention were the extraordinary privileges his government had quietly granted the organization four months earlier—immunities so sweeping that they effectively place a private climate organization beyond the reach of Kenyan law.

The decision, formalized through Legal Notice No. 82 and approved by Parliament in late September, has ignited a fierce debate that cuts to the heart of contemporary anxieties about globalization, sovereignty, and who really benefits when international organizations set up shop in developing nations.

The immunities granted to the GCA—including protection from lawsuits, tax exemptions, and inviolability of premises—mirror those typically reserved for sovereign states or United Nations agencies, not for what is essentially a well-funded nonprofit with powerful backers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

For critics, the timing tells a story.

Patrick Verkooijen, the Dutch CEO of the GCA who also serves as Chancellor of the University of Nairobi , was appointed to the university post by Ruto in January 2024, a full year before the privileges were formalized.

His fingerprints are said to be all over Kenya’s climate policy architecture, including the contentious 2023 amendments to the Climate Change Act that opened the door to carbon trading—a mechanism that has sparked fierce debate about whether it represents genuine climate action or a new form of resource extraction wrapped in green rhetoric.

The Netherlands connection adds another layer of intrigue.

The Dutch government announced it would stop funding the GCA’s Rotterdam base after next year , a decision that followed years of questions about the organization’s effectiveness and transparency.

The GCA has been operating from a floating office on Rotterdam’s waterfront, a symbolic gesture meant to highlight rising sea levels but one that critics in the Netherlands increasingly viewed as more spectacle than substance.

With European funding drying up, the GCA has hinted at shutting down its Rotterdam operations and relocating entirely to Nairobi .

The Centre for Global Adaptation CEO Patrick Verkoojien with the King of Netherlands Willem Alexander at the inauguration of Prof Dr Patrick Verkoojien’s Centre for Global Adaptation floating office at Rotterdam in 2021.

The parallels to another powerful foundation are impossible to ignore.

In 2024, Kenya granted similar sweeping immunities to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, only to suspend them after a public outcry and legal challenge.

The Gates Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into African health and agricultural programs, found itself accused of operating beyond democratic accountability, pursuing agendas that prioritized technological fixes over community-led solutions.

The foundation quietly withdrew from pursuing a full host country agreement in April 2025, a tacit acknowledgment that the controversy had become untenable.

Now, the same script appears to be playing out with the GCA, and the Gates connection is more than coincidental. Bill Gates himself co-chaired the Global Commission on Adaptation alongside Ban Ki-moon and Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

The commission’s 2019 report called for massive investments in adaptation infrastructure—the kind that would benefit from exactly the sort of immunities Kenya is now providing.

The legal architecture deserves scrutiny. Under Kenya’s Privileges and Immunities Act, the designation of an international organization typically applies to multilateral bodies where member states exercise collective governance—the United Nations, the African Union, intergovernmental development banks.

The GCA, by contrast, is registered in the Netherlands as a foundation, governed by a board of directors rather than by states.

Its funders include the Netherlands, China, the United Kingdom, and various philanthropic entities, but these are donors, not members in any formal sense that would confer international legal personality.

The immunities themselves are breathtaking in scope. The GCA’s premises cannot be entered by Kenyan authorities without consent. Its archives and documents are inviolable. It can import and export goods for official use without paying customs duties. Its assets cannot be seized or subjected to any form of administrative or legal process without explicit waiver.

For an organization working on climate adaptation—which inevitably involves land use, agricultural practices, and infrastructure projects that can displace communities or alter livelihoods—such blanket immunity raises profound questions about redress.

Consider a hypothetical scenario: The GCA partners with a Kenyan county government on a climate-resilient infrastructure project—perhaps a dam or irrigation system.

The project displaces a farming community or disrupts water access downstream. Under normal circumstances, affected citizens could sue for compensation or seek injunctions.

But if the GCA’s immunity shield holds, those legal avenues might be foreclosed. The organization could argue that the project falls under its official functions, rendering it immune from Kenyan courts.

Or consider the financial arrangements.

The GCA works extensively on climate finance mechanisms, including carbon markets and adaptation funds.

If disputes arise over the terms of these arrangements—if, say, smallholder farmers claim they were misled about carbon credit agreements or that promised payments never materialized—would the GCA’s immunity prevent them from seeking legal remedy?

The Order is silent on these questions, and therein lies the danger.

The parliamentary process that approved these privileges was cursory at best.

The Departmental Committee on Environment, Forestry, and Mining issued a public call for views in July, giving interested parties just over two weeks to respond during a period when many Kenyans were focused on other pressing matters.

The committee’s report, tabled and approved on September 30, offered little substantive analysis of the potential downsides or alternative approaches. The debate, such as it was, lasted mere hours.

On Kenyan social media, the response has been caustic. One widely shared post captured the mood: “Why should Kenya give an NGO immunity? Our leaders act like puppets for whose benefit? Not ours.”

Another, more pointed, asked why an organization needs diplomatic protection if its work is truly beneficial.

“If you’re here to help us adapt to climate change, why do you need immunity from our courts?” The subtext is clear: These privileges smell of neocolonialism, of powerful foreign interests securing legal protection to operate beyond the reach of those they claim to serve.

The conflict-of-interest question surrounding Verkooijen remains unaddressed.

As University of Nairobi chancellor, he wields considerable influence over one of Africa’s premier research institutions, an institution increasingly oriented toward climate science and policy.

As GCA CEO, he leads an organization that benefits from Kenya’s climate policies and now enjoys extraordinary legal protections.

The potential for these roles to reinforce each other in ways that serve institutional rather than public interests is obvious, yet no mechanism for managing this tension appears to exist.

President William Ruto hosted The ‪Centre for Global Adaptation‬ officials where the deal was sealed to setup its headquarters in Nairobi.

There are, to be fair, arguments in favor of the immunities. International organizations do require certain protections to function effectively, particularly in contexts where political winds can shift rapidly. Without immunity from legal harassment, the thinking goes, organizations could be paralyzed by frivolous lawsuits or subjected to pressure from hostile political factions. The immunities also facilitate recruitment of international staff who might otherwise be deterred by uncertain legal status.

But these arguments, developed in the mid-20th century for entities like the United Nations, were premised on organizations accountable to member states through formal governance structures. They were meant to protect multilateral cooperation, not to insulate well-funded nonprofits from scrutiny. The GCA’s governance model—a self-perpetuating board, opaque decision-making, funding from a mix of governments and private foundations—bears little resemblance to the intergovernmental bodies for which these immunities were designed.

Kenya’s eagerness to host the GCA reflects a broader pattern. Under Ruto’s administration, the country has positioned itself as a climate leadership hub, hosting international conferences and championing African climate priorities on the global stage. This brings prestige and potentially attracts investment, but it also creates incentives to accommodate powerful international actors. The groundbreaking ceremony in July was vintage Ruto: grand pronouncements about African agency and climate justice, delivered in the presence of foreign dignitaries whose organizations operate with minimal accountability to African publics.

The award of the Chief of the Order of the Golden Heart to Ban Ki-moon during that same ceremony now appears less like recognition of service and more like the sealing of a bargain. Ban’s environmental diplomacy, whatever its global merits, has produced an organization that will now operate in Kenya with extraordinary autonomy. The honor, Kenya’s highest civilian award, carries a message: We welcome you, we trust you, we will not ask difficult questions.

What happens next matters not just for Kenya but for the emerging architecture of global climate governance. As climate finance flows increase—the commitment at COP28 to operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund will funnel billions to developing nations—the question of who controls these resources and under what terms of accountability becomes central. If the model is one where well-connected international organizations operate behind immunity shields, pursuing agendas shaped by distant boardrooms and philanthropic foundations, the promise of climate justice will ring hollow.

The Dutch withdrawal from funding the GCA speaks volumes. Even in a wealthy European nation with robust civil society and media scrutiny, questions about the organization’s effectiveness and governance proved troublesome enough that the government chose to pull back. Kenya, with far less institutional capacity to monitor and hold accountable powerful international actors, has instead opened the door wider.

For ordinary Kenyans, the abstraction of diplomatic immunity may feel remote from daily concerns about drought, flooding, and food security. But these legal frameworks shape who gets to make decisions about climate adaptation strategies, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits when adaptation projects unfold. They determine whether a farmer in Turkana or a fisher on Lake Victoria has any recourse if a climate project harms their livelihood. They decide whether transparency and accountability are negotiable principles or non-negotiable prerequisites.

The government’s argument—that these privileges will accelerate climate action—deserves interrogation. Accelerate for whom? Action defined by whom? The history of development interventions in Africa is littered with projects that accelerated something, just not the wellbeing of local communities. From structural adjustment programs to conservation schemes that displaced indigenous peoples, the pattern is familiar: Grand initiatives backed by international institutions, insulated from democratic accountability, pursuing objectives that look excellent on paper and serve interests other than those of the people most affected.

Climate change demands urgent action, and Kenya is among the nations most vulnerable to its impacts. The country’s leadership on adaptation is crucial. But urgency cannot justify abandoning basic principles of sovereignty and accountability. The climate crisis will not be solved by replicating the power structures that created it, merely repackaged in green language and equipped with immunity clauses.

As the GCA prepares to establish its full operations in Nairobi, the fundamental question remains unanswered: In whose interests does this organization truly operate, and who will have the power to ask that question when things go wrong? The privileges granted by Kenya ensure that, should conflicts arise, the answers will be found outside Kenyan courtrooms, beyond the reach of Kenyan law, and probably beyond the influence of Kenyan citizens. That is not partnership. That is something else entirely—something that deserves a far more skeptical eye than it has yet received.