The urbanization of climate finance
Understanding for urban action
Sarah Knuth (Durham University)
Zac Taylor (TU Delft - Urban Development Management)
Sahar Zavareh Hofmann (University of York)
Fritz-Julius Grafe (Universitat Zurich)
C.S. Ponder (The University of Texas at Austin)
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Abstract
Understandings of climate finance are in flux today in politically urgent ways, posing timely questions for critical urban scholarship and practice. The term climate finance came prominently into use as a point of contention in United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) debates over the last decade. It was employed in calls upon wealthy countries to dedicate funding to support climate change responses in the Global South—recognizing that many countries who have contributed least to the climate crisis now stand to suffer most from its impacts. Climate finance is also a growing priority for multilateral and bilateral development funders. However, governmental and multilateral channels of climate finance have persistently failed to meet pledged and called-for commitments, let alone address the more significant climate financing gap facing communities worldwide, or the even higher tally suggested by more transformative understandings of climate/ecological debt and reparations. Growing critical scholarship suggests that a major outcome of—and underlying factor in—this political impasse has been an increase in the power of private financial institutions to set the terms of new climate-related investment, and to define narratives of (and capacity for) financing responses in their favor. [...]