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The recent creation of a loss and damage fund under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was heralded as a major breakthrough for Global South negotiators. As details of the fund are currently being negotiated, some analysts are calling for ‘objective’ means through which funding would be allocated to ‘particularly vulnerable’ developing countries. On the basis of a review of past debates relating to the identification of priority beneficiaries of international adaptation finance, we caution that such an approach is likely to bring division and delay. Quantitative vulnerability indicators remain conceptually fraught and methodologically complex. Furthermore, the adoption of vulnerability indicators will not fully depoliticize allocation decisions, given the power dynamics between and among contributor and beneficiary countries., SCOPUS: re.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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., iiTSE, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

iiTSE, SCOPUS: no.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published