An impact-driven government actively enables and promotes impact economies through its roles as a market participant, market regulator, and market facilitator.

To perform each of these roles, governments use a broad range of policy tools. These build a comprehensive toolkit that governments have at hand for driving impact economies in their countries. These policy tools include: establishing Sustainable Finance Taxonomies, formalising National Impact Investing Strategies, issuing Sustainable Bonds, enacting Specific Legal Forms for Impact Businesses, launching Outcome Partnerships, enabling the establishment of Wholesale Impact Funds, implementing Fiscal Incentives, mandating Sustainability Disclosures for companies and investors, adopting Public Procurement for Impact, setting up Dedicated Government Agencies and Offices, developing Capacity Building Programmes, and launching Funding Programmes.

For more information on the roles that governments can play to foster impact economies and their set of policy tools, refer to GSG Impact's Policymakers’ Toolkit (2025)

The Tracker builds on the framework developed in the GSG’s paper Towards Impact Economies: Aligning government action and private capital for public good, which identifies 14 different policy tools that governments can leverage to build thriving impact economies. It highlights case studies identified as best practices across each one of those tools.

The Tracker features 80 case studies highlighting best practices across 15 different policy tools, covering 30 countries and jurisdictions where GSG Impact has National Partners. All policies included were implemented between 2010 and 2024. Featured best practices can be filtered by the following criteria:

1. Government Role: Market Facilitator, Market Regulator, or Market Participant.
2. Policy Type: Sustainable Finance Taxonomies, National Impact Investing Strategies, Sustainable Bonds, Specific Legal Forms for Impact Businesses, Outcome Partnerships, Government-enabled Wholesale Funds, Fiscal Incentives, Sustainability disclosure regulations, Clarifying Investors’ Legal Duties and Mandating ESG Disclosures, Public Procurement for Impact, Dedicated Government Agencies and Offices, Capacity Building Programmes, Funding Programmes, Facilitating Retail Investor’s Participation and Multi-Stakeholder Platforms. Detailed descriptions of each policy tool are available in the corresponding case studies featured in the Tracker.
3. Region
4. Year

The Tracker was developed through desk research using both primary and secondary sources and validated with GSG National Partners. The selection of best practices followed a two-stage process. First, an initial pool of +100 case studies were compiled based on their relevance and geographic diversity. In the second stage, a stringent selection criteria was applied to define the final set of case studies. 

To qualify as a best practice, each policy had to meet at least one of the following criteria:

• mobilised significant capital;
• demonstrated effectiveness or relevant results through impact evaluations;
• was recognised as a “first mover” or landmark initiative;
• featured a particularly innovative approach; or
• reflected a meaningful adaptation to a specific local or jurisdictional context.

While some best practices date back to 2010, we prioritised a) more recent and innovative examples -especially those from the past five years- and b) cases in which GSG National Partners were directly involved or played a role in their development or implementation, provided they met the criteria outlined above. All sources used are included as hyperlinks within each case study.

The tracker is by design a living repository that is expected to evolve over time guided by users’ feedback, the changing needs of our National Partners, and the emergence of new best practices worldwide.