Abstract

Green finance governance has become one of the major pillars of the current global climate governance. Transnational climate governance institutions increasingly initiate green finance policy instruments, such as climate-related financial  risk disclosures, and build new allies to mobilize money that could accelerate a global net-zero transition. These new types of climate finance governance steer transnational financial flows and determine for whom the money is allocated.

Despite rapidly growing climate finance, developing countries remain lacking in funds and investments to cope with climate challenges. Moreover, some climate financial tools reproduce the disparity between the Global North and the Global South (e.g., small-scale farmers’ purchase of crop insurance due to severe droughts in Africa). This  normative aspect of green finance governance has been marginalized in policy and academic debates but needs to be centered for just transition.

This paper explores emerging issues of global inequality and justice in global climate finance governance through the lens of climate colonialism. Climate coloniality has been shaped by extractive capitalism, and it (re)produces unequal exchanges between the Global North and the Global South in multidimensional aspects, including ecological and epistemological inequalities. In that sense, the existing climate finance governance architecture seems to be a venue of climate colonialism based on the dominant influence of financial experts and elite groups.

• How and when do global climate finance instruments trigger multi-layered global inequalities?
• What types of asymmetrical power relations are behind the inequalities?
• Who has the agency to set governance rules and agendas for whom?

As the first step to understand the sociopolitical dynamics in global climate finance governance, this research conducts a discourse mapping based on a systematic review of academic literature across disciplines and policy documents published by selected global green finance governance initiatives (from 2000 to present). 

This mapping exercise aims to find major policy and academic discourses on equity and justice issues in the global climate finance governance realm. It shows what knowledge network does or does not shed light on the global disparities.

Based on the findings, I suggest some research agendas to support equitable climate finance policies and argue that inter- and transdisciplinary approaches are necessary to develop the research direction.

Politics and Development Studies Research Group | Department of Political Science (lu.se)

Studying political aspects of development of special relevance for low- and middle-income countries