The unequal geographies of climate finance: Climate injustice and dependency in the world system

Abstract

Central to climate justice is the question of who will pay for the mitigation and adaptation efforts needed as the climate crisis worsens, particularly in countries that bear little responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate finance is a complex set of mechanisms intended to address this concern. World-systems theory has long understood international development assistance as a tool that reproduces spatial dependency between states. In this paper, we ask whether climate finance follows the expectations of world-systems theory and reproduces relationships of dependency, or if it instead advances climate justice and challenges spatial dependency in the world-system. Through this analysis, we consider the implications of climate finance for world-systems theory. We use recent empirical data to ask whether climate finance follows or challenges world-systems theory expectations, focusing on five areas: (1) spatial flows of climate finance between the core, semi-periphery, and periphery; (2) the governance of climate finance institutions; (3) the types of projects supported by climate finance; (4) the relationship of projects to dominant systems of extraction, production, and consumption; and (5) the agency of peripheral state and non-state actors in shaping climate finance in relation to their interests. Taken together, we argue that climate finance in many ways reproduces relationships of dependency, though potential avenues exist for contesting this unequal balance of power and for advocating for climate justice. This case illustrates the need to approach analyses of dependency in a nuanced way, interrogating specific processes through which dependency is produced and contested across scales.