Climate, Coloniality and Financialization: A Decolonial Analysis of Global Climate Finance

Abstract: Providing adequate climate finance, meaning funding for mitigation, adaptation or loss and damage, has been very high on the global policy agenda recently. The political economy and ecology behind it are much more complex and morally multidimensional than the mainstream finance world likes to present it though, which results in grave colonial injustices, international debt crises, deepened global inequalities and heightened climate vulnerabilities. I conducted a decolonial content and policy analysis of global climate finance to shed light on these processes and assess possible suggestions for reform. I found that the climate finance landscape is deeply infused with coloniality, across the dimensions of being, power and knowledge. Concretely, omnipresent financialization, especially with regards to risk and vulnerability accounting, is aggravating coloniality by discounting and commodifying human lives. Similarly, the continued favoring of privatization creates undemocratic power imbalances and increases sovereign debt to the detriment of social spending. I illustrate this with the examples of the multilateral, World Bank and IMF-backed Green Climate Fund and Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. Decolonizing this dangerously hubristic system is not evident, but another example, the Bridgetown Initiative, shows that well-crafted, global South-led demands for reform to address the debt burden and build climate resilience can be a step on the way towards the decoloniality of climate finance.