The head of the Green Climate Fund has confirmed Australia will not be able to dictate where its $200m contribution will be spent, contrary to the Abbott government’s assertions when it announced it was reversing its previous refusal to give money to the fund.



Announcing Australia would provide $200m to the fund late last year Tony Abbott said the funding would be “strictly invested in practical projects” and environment minister, Greg Hunt, said Australia was providing the money “on the condition it will be spent within the region for our priorities”.



“We set the terms of our engagement and those of our involvement, and those terms are very clear: support for the Asia Pacific, a focus on rainforests, a focus on combating illegal logging.”



“The difference here is that we’re able to target what we’re doing to the region. So on our terms, in our time, in a way which protects the rainforests of the area, our priorities which don’t just help reduce emissions, but they protect the iconic species,” Hunt said.



But in an interview with Guardian Australia, the fund’s executive director, Héla Cheikhrouhou, said decisions about disbursement of the $10bn already pledged to the fund would be made by the board, according to a single, clear set of guidelines and priorities.

Individual contributors would not be able to dictate where “their” money was spent, although they would be able to track exactly how the fund, as a whole, was performing in their areas of interest.



Australia is represented on the fund’s board by a senior representative of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and many of the priorities determined by the board coincide with the Australian government’s desired areas of expenditure.



The fund is seen as critical to the success of this December’s climate summit in Paris, which aims to reach an agreement on global emissions reductions after 2020. It is seen as an important mechanism to gain trust and win support for a new agreement from developing countries.



Australia’s $200m contribution comes from its existing aid budget.

Cheikhrouhou said she expected the fund would begin approving projects by later this year, and contributing countries would begin formally signing a template agreement with the fund in April.

Before the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, announced Australia’s contribution at last year’s Lima climate summit, Abbott had disparaged the fund as a “Bob Brown bank on an international scale” to which Australia would make no contribution.

And at the G20 meeting in November the prime minister resisted mounting global pressure to commit to the fund.

Asked about the fund before last year’s UN climate meeting in Warsaw, the prime minister said: “We’re not going to be making any contributions to that.”

It was reported that at one of its first cabinet meetings the Abbott government decided it would make no contributions to the fund.

At the time the prime minister compared it to a domestic fund championed by the former Greens leader Bob Brown, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which Abbott wants to abolish.

He told the Australian: “One thing the current government will never do is say one thing at home and a different thing abroad. We are committed to dismantling the Bob Brown bank at home so it would be impossible for us to support a Bob Brown bank on an international scale.”

The government also pointedly dissented from support for the fund in a communique from last November’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting – a stance backed by Canada. Canada has also announced it will now contribute to the fund.